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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/A_bit_more_on_privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker.html">A bit more on privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker</a>
26 </div>
27 <div class="date">
28 13th August 2018
29 </div>
30 <div class="body">
31 <p>A few days ago, I wondered if there are any privacy respecting
32 health monitors and/or fitness trackers available for sale these days.
33 I would like to buy one, but do not want to share my personal data
34 with strangers, nor be forced to have a mobile phone to get data out
35 of the unit. I've received some ideas, and would like to share them
36 with you.
37
38 One interesting data point was a pointer to a Free Software app for
39 Android named
40 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/">Gadgetbridge</a>.
41 It provide cloudless collection and storing of data from a variety of
42 trackers. Its
43 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/#supported-devices">list
44 of supported devices</a> is a good indicator for units where the
45 protocol is fairly open, as it is obviously being handled by Free
46 Software. Other units are reportedly encrypting the collected
47 information with their own public key, making sure only the vendor
48 cloud service is able to extract data from the unit. The people
49 contacting me about Gadgetbirde said they were using
50 <a href="https://us.amazfit.com/shop/bip?variant=336750">Amazfit
51 Bip</a> and
52 <a href="http://www.xiaomimi6phone.com/xiaomi-mi-band-3-features-release-date-rumors/">Xiaomi
53 Band 3</a>.</p>
54
55 <p>I also got a suggestion to look at some of the units from Garmin.
56 I was told their GPS watches can be connected via USB and show up as a
57 USB storage device with
58 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-development/fmt_garmin_fit.html">Garmin
59 FIT files</a> containing the collected measurements. While
60 proprietary, FIT files apparently can be read at least by
61 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org">GPSBabel</a> and the
62 <a href="https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/gpxpod">GpxPod</a> Nextcloud
63 app. It is unclear to me if they can read step count and heart rate
64 data. The person I talked to was using a
65 <a href="https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/564291">Garmin Forerunner
66 935</a>, which is a fairly expensive unit. I doubt it is worth it for
67 a unit where the vendor clearly is trying its best to move from open
68 to closed systems. I still remember when Garmin dropped NMEA support
69 in its GPSes.</p>
70
71 <p>A final idea was to build ones own unit, perhaps by basing it on a
72 wearable hardware platforms like
73 <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/flora-geo-watch">the Flora Geo
74 Watch</a>. Sound like fun, but I had more money than time to spend on
75 the topic, so I suspect it will have to wait for another time.</p>
76
77 <p>While I was working on tracking down links, I came across an
78 inspiring TED talk by Dave Debronkart about
79 <a href="https://archive.org/details/DavedeBronkart_2010X">being a
80 e-patient</a>, and discovered the web site
81 <a href="https://participatorymedicine.org/epatients/">Participatory
82 Medicine</a>. If you too want to track your own health and fitness
83 without having information about your private life floating around on
84 computers owned by others, I recommend checking it out.</p>
85
86 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
87 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
88 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
89
90 </div>
91 <div class="tags">
92
93
94 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
95
96
97 </div>
98 </div>
99 <div class="padding"></div>
100
101 <div class="entry">
102 <div class="title">
103 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker_.html">Privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker?</a>
104 </div>
105 <div class="date">
106 7th August 2018
107 </div>
108 <div class="body">
109 <p>Dear lazyweb,</p>
110
111 <p>I wonder, is there a fitness tracker / health monitor available for
112 sale today that respect the users privacy? With this I mean a
113 watch/bracelet capable of measuring pulse rate and other
114 fitness/health related values (and by all means, also the correct time
115 and location if possible), which is <strong>only</strong> provided for
116 me to extract/read from the unit with computer without a radio beacon
117 and Internet connection. In other words, it do not depend on a cell
118 phone app, and do make the measurements available via other peoples
119 computer (aka "the cloud"). The collected data should be available
120 using only free software. I'm not interested in depending on some
121 non-free software that will leave me high and dry some time in the
122 future. I've been unable to find any such unit. I would like to buy
123 it. The ones I have seen for sale here in Norway are proud to report
124 that they share my health data with strangers (aka "cloud enabled").
125 Is there an alternative? I'm not interested in giving money to people
126 requiring me to accept "privacy terms" to allow myself to measure my
127 own health.</p>
128
129 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
130 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
131 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
132
133 </div>
134 <div class="tags">
135
136
137 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
138
139
140 </div>
141 </div>
142 <div class="padding"></div>
143
144 <div class="entry">
145 <div class="title">
146 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
147 </div>
148 <div class="date">
149 31st July 2018
150 </div>
151 <div class="body">
152 <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
153 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
154 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
155 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox. The last few days I
156 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
157 share it with you. I would like to publish images on a server under
158 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
159 free and open standard to the images I published. As my primary
160 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
161 UTF-8. Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
162 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
163 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
164 of such frames. In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
165
166 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
167 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
168 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
169 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
170 NASA. This proved to work well. More recently I discovered that
171 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
172 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
173 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
174 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
175 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news. For
176 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
177 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
178 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
179
180 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
181 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance. I adjusted my <a
182 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
183 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
184 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
185 RSS file. I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
186 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
187 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not. The relevant EXIF
188 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives. XMP
189 seem to have the support I need.</p>
190
191 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
192 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
193 photo managing software. I ended up using the tags set using this
194 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
195
196 <blockquote><pre>
197 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
198 -description='The RSS image description.' \
199 -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
200 </pre></blockquote>
201
202 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
203 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject". I
204 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
205 shared with my family. Images with this keyword set are located and
206 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
207
208 <p>Are there better ways to do this? Get in touch if you have better
209 suggestions.</p>
210
211 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
212 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
213 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
214
215 </div>
216 <div class="tags">
217
218
219 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
220
221
222 </div>
223 </div>
224 <div class="padding"></div>
225
226 <div class="entry">
227 <div class="title">
228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
229 </div>
230 <div class="date">
231 12th July 2018
232 </div>
233 <div class="body">
234 <p>Last night, I wrote
235 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
236 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
237 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
238 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
239 approach requiring no setup at all. It is a single script that take
240 care of it all.</p>
241
242 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
243 desktop and stream it to Kodi. This fixed the video quality issue I
244 saw initially. It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
245 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
246 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
247 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
248 GStreamer. Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial. Copy
249 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
250 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
251 up on the Kodi screen. Note, it depend on multicast on the local
252 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
253 script must be modified. Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
254 I only care about the picture part.</p>
255
256 <blockquote><pre>
257 #!/bin/sh
258 #
259 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi. See
260 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
261 # for backgorund information.
262
263 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
264 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
265 # kodi server). Do the same when interrupting this script.
266 kodicmd() {
267 host="$1"
268 cmd="$2"
269 params="$3"
270 curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
271 --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
272 "http://$host/jsonrpc"
273 }
274 cleanup() {
275 if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
276 # Stop the playing when we end
277 playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
278 jq .result[].playerid)
279 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
280 fi
281 if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
282 kill "$gstpid"
283 fi
284 }
285 trap cleanup EXIT INT
286
287 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
288 kodihost=$1
289 shift
290 else
291 kodihost=kodi.local
292 fi
293
294 mcast=239.255.0.1
295 mcastport=1234
296 mcastttl=1
297
298 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
299 cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
300 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
301 videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
302 x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
303 key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
304 mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
305 udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
306 pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
307 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
308 gstpid=$!
309
310 # Give stream a second to get going
311 sleep 1
312
313 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
314 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
315 "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
316
317 # wait for gst to end
318 wait "$gstpid"
319 </pre></blockquote>
320
321 <p>I hope you find the approach useful. I know I do.</p>
322
323 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
324 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
325 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
326
327 </div>
328 <div class="tags">
329
330
331 Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
332
333
334 </div>
335 </div>
336 <div class="padding"></div>
337
338 <div class="entry">
339 <div class="title">
340 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
341 </div>
342 <div class="date">
343 12th July 2018
344 </div>
345 <div class="body">
346 <p>PS: See
347 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
348 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
349
350 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
351 my projector connected to Kodi. I sadly had to admit that I had no
352 idea, as it was a task I never had tried. Since then, I have been
353 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
354 install on either side. Today I found a way that seem to kind of
355 work. Not great, but it is a start.</p>
356
357 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
358 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
359 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
360 local storage enough to store the stream locally. This is not going
361 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
362 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
363
364 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
365 video stream that Kodi could play. Preferably using
366 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
367 side when starting such stream. Unfortunately, the only recipe I
368 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
369 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
370
371 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working! Unfortunately I
372 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
373 sending command and the file on the Kodi server. But it is showing my
374 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
375 the programs I work on.</p>
376
377 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces. I combined the
378 rtp and rtsp recipes from
379 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
380 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
381 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
382
383 <blockquote><pre>
384 vlc screen:// --sout \
385 '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
386 </pre></blockquote>
387
388 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
389 same IP address:</p>
390
391 <blockquote><pre>
392 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
393 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
394 </pre></blockquote>
395
396 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address. As far
397 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work. In other
398 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
399 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
400 recipe. To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
401 file while the VLC stream is running. The desktop then show up in my
402 big screen. :)</p>
403
404 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
405 the audio quality is really bad. No idea if the problem is package
406 loss or bad parameters for the transcode. I do not know VLC nor Kodi
407 enough to tell.</p>
408
409 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
410 succestions and reminded me about an important step. The "screen:"
411 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
412 package is installed on Debian. Without it, you will see this error
413 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'. Check the log
414 for details." He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
415 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
416 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
417 window in the desktop view. In sum, this give us this command line on
418 the source end
419
420 <blockquote><pre>
421 cvlc screen:// --sout \
422 '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
423 </pre></blockquote>
424
425 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
426
427 <blockquote><pre>
428 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
429 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
430 </pre></blockquote>
431
432 <p>Still bad image quality, though. But I did discover that streaming
433 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
434 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
435 parts, not the rtsp part. I've tried to change the vb and ab
436 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
437 difference.</p>
438
439 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
440 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great! He also
441 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
442 its source. By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
443 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
444 multicast address on port 1234:
445
446 <blockquote><pre>
447 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
448 videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
449 x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
450 key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
451 mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
452 udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
453 pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
454 grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
455 audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
456 </pre></blockquote>
457
458 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
459
460 <blockquote><pre>
461 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
462 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
463 </pre></blockquote>
464
465 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source. It might not
466 pick the one you need. This approach will of course lead to trouble
467 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
468 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
469 local network. If the value is increased, your screen will be
470 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
471 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
472
473 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
474 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
475 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
476 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
477
478 <blockquote><pre>
479 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
480 </pre></blockquote>
481
482 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
483 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
484 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
485
486 </div>
487 <div class="tags">
488
489
490 Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
491
492
493 </div>
494 </div>
495 <div class="padding"></div>
496
497 <div class="entry">
498 <div class="title">
499 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
500 </div>
501 <div class="date">
502 9th July 2018
503 </div>
504 <div class="body">
505 <p>Five years ago,
506 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
507 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
508 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive. Since
509 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
510 the task a lot easier. This made me want to repeat the measurement,
511 to see how much things changed. Here are the new numbers, for
512 unstable only this time:
513
514 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
515
516 <pre>
517 count MIME type
518 ----- -----------------------
519 56 image/jpeg
520 55 image/png
521 49 image/tiff
522 48 image/gif
523 39 image/bmp
524 38 text/plain
525 37 audio/mpeg
526 34 application/ogg
527 33 audio/x-flac
528 32 audio/x-mp3
529 30 audio/x-wav
530 30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
531 29 image/x-portable-pixmap
532 27 inode/directory
533 27 image/x-portable-bitmap
534 27 audio/x-mpeg
535 26 application/x-ogg
536 25 audio/x-mpegurl
537 25 audio/ogg
538 24 text/html
539 </pre>
540
541 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
542 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
543 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
544
545 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
546 as the most announced supported MIME type. These days, thanks to the
547 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
548 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
549 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
550 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
551 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
552 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;. For example if you, like
553 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
554 list like this:</p>
555
556 <p><blockquote><pre>
557 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
558 Package: anjuta
559 Package: audacious
560 Package: baobab
561 Package: cervisia
562 Package: chirp
563 Package: dolphin
564 Package: doublecmd-common
565 Package: easytag
566 Package: enlightenment
567 Package: ephoto
568 Package: filelight
569 Package: gwenview
570 Package: k4dirstat
571 Package: kaffeine
572 Package: kdesvn
573 Package: kid3
574 Package: kid3-qt
575 Package: nautilus
576 Package: nemo
577 Package: pcmanfm
578 Package: pcmanfm-qt
579 Package: qweborf
580 Package: ranger
581 Package: sirikali
582 Package: spacefm
583 Package: spacefm
584 Package: vifm
585 %
586 </pre></blockquote></p>
587
588 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
589 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
590
591 <p><blockquote><pre>
592 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/vnd.sketchup.skp
593 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
594 %
595 </pre></blockquote></p>
596
597 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
598 format:</p>
599
600 <p><blockquote><pre>
601 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/sla|grep Package
602 Package: cura
603 Package: meshlab
604 Package: printrun
605 %
606 </pre></blockquote></p>
607
608 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
609
610 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
611 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
612 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
613
614 </div>
615 <div class="tags">
616
617
618 Tags: <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>.
619
620
621 </div>
622 </div>
623 <div class="padding"></div>
624
625 <div class="entry">
626 <div class="title">
627 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
628 </div>
629 <div class="date">
630 8th July 2018
631 </div>
632 <div class="body">
633 <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
634 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
635 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'. I normally
636 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
637 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
638 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
639 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
640 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually. I concluded
641 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
642 decided to see if I could automate it. I came up with this small
643 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
644
645 <p><blockquote><pre>
646 #!/bin/sh
647 #
648 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
649 # upgradable package in one lump. Fetching packages to upgrade using
650 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
651 # flag for manual/automatic.
652
653 set -e
654
655 ignore() {
656 if [ "$1" ]; then
657 grep -v "$1"
658 else
659 cat
660 fi
661 }
662
663 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
664 echo "Upgrading $p"
665 apt clean
666 apt install --download-only -y $p
667 for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
668 if [ -e "$f" ]; then
669 dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
670 break
671 fi
672 done
673 done
674 </pre></blockquote></p>
675
676 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
677 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
678 downloaded packages using dpkg. The idea is to upgrade packages
679 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
680 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency). To
681 use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it fail, try
682 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again. This
683 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
684 packages. dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
685
686 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
687 upgrade. The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
688 the packages that are simply too large to unpack. Today this was
689 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
690 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
691
692 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
693 alternative ways to handle this. The "unattended-upgrades
694 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
695 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
696 first. It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
697 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
698 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
699
700 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
701 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
702 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
703
704 </div>
705 <div class="tags">
706
707
708 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
709
710
711 </div>
712 </div>
713 <div class="padding"></div>
714
715 <div class="entry">
716 <div class="title">
717 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_worlds_only_stone_power_plant_.html">The worlds only stone power plant?</a>
718 </div>
719 <div class="date">
720 30th June 2018
721 </div>
722 <div class="body">
723 <p>So far, at least hydro-electric power, coal power, wind power,
724 solar power, and wood power are well known. Until a few days ago, I
725 had never heard of stone power. Then I learn about a quarry in a
726 mountain in
727 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremanger">Bremanger</a> i
728 Norway, where
729 <a href="https://www.bontrup.com/en/activities/raw-materials/bremanger-quarry/">the
730 Bremanger Quarry</a> company is extracting stone and dumping the stone
731 into a shaft leading to its shipping harbour. This downward movement
732 in this shaft is used to produce electricity. In short, it is using
733 falling rocks instead of falling water to produce electricity, and
734 according to its own statements it is producing more power than it is
735 using, and selling the surplus electricity to the Norwegian power
736 grid. I find the concept truly amazing. Is this the worlds only
737 stone power plant?</p>
738
739 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
740 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
741 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
742
743 </div>
744 <div class="tags">
745
746
747 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
748
749
750 </div>
751 </div>
752 <div class="padding"></div>
753
754 <div class="entry">
755 <div class="title">
756 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Add_on_to_control_the_projector_from_within_Kodi.html">Add-on to control the projector from within Kodi</a>
757 </div>
758 <div class="date">
759 26th June 2018
760 </div>
761 <div class="body">
762 <p>My movie playing setup involve <a href="https://kodi.tv/">Kodi</a>,
763 <a href="https://openelec.tv">OpenELEC</a> (probably soon to be
764 replaced with <a href="https://libreelec.tv/">LibreELEC</a>) and an
765 Infocus IN76 video projector. My projector can be controlled via both
766 a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line. The vendor of
767 my projector, <a href="https://www.infocus.com/">InFocus</a>, had been
768 sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
769 it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
770 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/infocus-projector-control">a
771 small script to control the projector</a>. For a while now, I longed
772 for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
773 such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
774 turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
775 on again.</p>
776
777 <p>A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
778 managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
779 got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
780 Add-on with support for several projectors. To my pleasure, he was
781 positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
782 add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
783 repository.</p>
784
785 <p>The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
786 adjustments. The most important change I do relative to the master
787 branch in the github repository is embedding the
788 <a href="https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial">pyserial module</a> in
789 the add-on. The long term solution is to make a "script" type
790 pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
791 Kodi. But until that in place, I embed it.</p>
792
793 <p>The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
794 starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
795 screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops. It can also be
796 told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
797
798 <p>If this sound interesting to you, check out
799 <a href="https://github.com/fredrik-eriksson/kodi_projcontrol">the
800 project github repository</a>. Perhaps you can send patches to
801 support your projector too? As soon as we find time to wrap up the
802 latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
803 Kodi instance.</p>
804
805 <p>For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
806 detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
807 projector from within Kodi. We also need to figure out how to handle
808 the cooling period of the projector. My projector refuses to turn on
809 for 60 seconds after it was turned off. This is not handled well by
810 the add-on at the moment.</p>
811
812 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
813 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
814 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
815
816 </div>
817 <div class="tags">
818
819
820 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>.
821
822
823 </div>
824 </div>
825 <div class="padding"></div>
826
827 <div class="entry">
828 <div class="title">
829 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Self_appointed_leaders_of_the_Free_World.html">Self-appointed leaders of the Free World</a>
830 </div>
831 <div class="date">
832 22nd March 2018
833 </div>
834 <div class="body">
835 <p>The leaders of the worlds have started to congratulate the
836 re-elected Russian head of state, and this causes some criticism. I
837 am though a little fascinated by a comment from USA senator John McCain,
838 <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/379339-mccain-rips-trumps-congratulatory-call-to-putin-as-insult-to-russian-people">sited
839 by The Hill and others</a>:
840
841 <p><blockquote>
842 <p>"An American president does not lead the Free World by
843 congratulating dictators on winning sham elections."</p>
844 </blockquote></p>
845
846 <p>While I totally agree with the senator here, the way the quote is
847 phrased make me suspect that he is unaware of the simple fact that USA
848 have not lead the Free World since at least before its government
849 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar">kidnapped a
850 completely innocent Canadian citizen in transit on his way home to
851 Canada via John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 and
852 sent him to be tortured in Syria for a year</a>.</p>
853
854 <p>USA might be running ahead, but the path they are taking is not the
855 one taken by any Free World.</p>
856
857 </div>
858 <div class="tags">
859
860
861 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
862
863
864 </div>
865 </div>
866 <div class="padding"></div>
867
868 <div class="entry">
869 <div class="title">
870 <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>
871 </div>
872 <div class="date">
873 21st March 2018
874 </div>
875 <div class="body">
876 <p>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
877 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
878 mostly in the USA. What I find a bit surprising, is how little
879 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
880 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place. And what about the
881 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
882 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
883 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
884 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
885 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
886 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.</p>
887
888 <p>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
889 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
890 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed. It is well known that
891 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
892 nevertheless. Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
893 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
894 information about the millions of Facebook users. Collected
895 information will be misused sooner or later. The only way to avoid
896 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place. If
897 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
898 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
899 information.</p>
900
901 <p>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
902 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
903 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely">According
904 to The Guardian</a>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
905 account removal (and not just 'disabling'). You need to
906 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=faq_content">visit
907 a specific Facebook page</a> and click on 'let us know' on that page
908 to get to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account">the
909 real account deletion screen</a>. Perhaps something to consider? I
910 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
911 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
912 exposure a bit.</p>
913
914 <p>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
915 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
916 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to <a href="">NUUG</a> last april about
917 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20170404-big-data-psychometric/">
918 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
919 politics</a>.</p>
920
921 <p>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
922 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
923 <a href="https://www.signal.org/">Signal</a> or
924 <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>, and stop sharing your private
925 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.</p>
926
927 </div>
928 <div class="tags">
929
930
931 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>.
932
933
934 </div>
935 </div>
936 <div class="padding"></div>
937
938 <div class="entry">
939 <div class="title">
940 <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>
941 </div>
942 <div class="date">
943 13th March 2018
944 </div>
945 <div class="body">
946 <p>I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative
947 Commons. This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories
948 from those around the globe making a living using Creative
949 Commons.</p>
950
951 <p>Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer
952 translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book
953 <a href="https://madewith.cc">Made with Creative Commons from 2017</a>
954 was complete. The Spanish translation is also complete, while the
955 Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work. Get in
956 touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to
957 translate into your mother tongue.</p>
958
959 <p>The whole book project started when
960 <a href="http://gwolf.org/node/4102">Gunnar Wolf announced</a> that he
961 was going to make a Spanish edition of the book. I noticed, and
962 offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with
963 translating the
964 <a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Free
965 Culture</a> and
966 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">The Debian
967 Administrator's Handbook</a> books to Norwegian Bokmål. To make a
968 long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the
969 first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of
970 Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself. The first
971 proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof
972 reading remains. We will also need to translate the 14 figures and
973 create a book cover. Once it is done we will publish the book on
974 paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.</p>
975
976 <p>The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is
977 downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc.
978 The Markdown is modified by a script before is converted to DocBook
979 using pandoc. The DocBook is modified again using a script before it
980 is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators. The translated
981 PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to
982 create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to
983 create the final PDF. The end result is a set of editions of the
984 manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.</p>
985
986 <p>The translation is conducted using
987 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/">the
988 Weblate web based translation system</a>. Please have a look there
989 and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof
990 reading. :)</p>
991
992 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
993 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
994 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
995
996 </div>
997 <div class="tags">
998
999
1000 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>.
1001
1002
1003 </div>
1004 </div>
1005 <div class="padding"></div>
1006
1007 <div class="entry">
1008 <div class="title">
1009 <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>
1010 </div>
1011 <div class="date">
1012 2nd March 2018
1013 </div>
1014 <div class="body">
1015 <p>Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of
1016 choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations.
1017 While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the
1018 info screen booting with some text scrolling. I was not quick enough
1019 with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot
1020 screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a
1021 corrupt file system:
1022
1023 <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>
1024
1025 <p>While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the
1026 content on the screen worries me.</p>
1027
1028 <p>The image show the version booting is 'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid',
1029 indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid
1030 after Debian Etch (version 4) was released 2007-04-08 and before
1031 Debian Lenny (version 5) was released 2009-02-14. Since Lenny Debian
1032 has released version 6 (Squeeze) 2011-02-06, 7 (Wheezy) 2013-05-04, 8
1033 (Jessie) 2015-04-25 and 9 (Stretch) 2017-06-15, according to
1034 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history">a Debian
1035 version history on Wikpedia</a>. This mean the system is running
1036 around 10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for
1037 many years.</p>
1038
1039 <p>This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company,
1040 Ruter, running outdated software. In 2012,
1041 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Er_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_uten_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_.html">I
1042 discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows 2000</a>,
1043 and this was
1044 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fortsatt_ingen_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_for_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_.html">still
1045 the case in 2016</a>. Given the response from the responsible people
1046 in 2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched
1047 Windows 2000. Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.</p>
1048
1049 <p>The photo is made available under the license terms
1050 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons
1051 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY 4.0)</a>.</p>
1052
1053 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1054 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1055 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1056
1057 </div>
1058 <div class="tags">
1059
1060
1061 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>.
1062
1063
1064 </div>
1065 </div>
1066 <div class="padding"></div>
1067
1068 <div class="entry">
1069 <div class="title">
1070 <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>
1071 </div>
1072 <div class="date">
1073 18th February 2018
1074 </div>
1075 <div class="body">
1076 <p>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
1077 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
1078 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
1079 <a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit">The upstream
1080 project still exist</a>, though, and up until today, the upstream
1081 source was available from Savannah via subversion. I am happy to
1082 report that this just changed.</p>
1083
1084 <p>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
1085 repositories:</p>
1086
1087 <ul>
1088
1089 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git">sysvinit</a></li>
1090 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git">insserv</a></li>
1091 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git">startpar</a></li>
1092
1093 </ul>
1094
1095 <p>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
1096 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
1097 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.</p>
1098
1099 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1100 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1101 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1102
1103 </div>
1104 <div class="tags">
1105
1106
1107 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>.
1108
1109
1110 </div>
1111 </div>
1112 <div class="padding"></div>
1113
1114 <div class="entry">
1115 <div class="title">
1116 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources</a>
1117 </div>
1118 <div class="date">
1119 14th February 2018
1120 </div>
1121 <div class="body">
1122 <p>A few days ago, a new major version of
1123 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a> was announced, and I
1124 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
1125 <a href="http://bittorrent.org/">bittorrent</a> and
1126 <a href="https://webtorrent.io">webtorrent</a>. Bittorrent is one of
1127 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
1128 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
1129 <a href="https://webrtc.org">WebRTC</a> as its transport channel,
1130 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
1131 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
1132 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
1133 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
1134 Looking at
1135 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html">the release
1136 notes</a> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
1137 the web. I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
1138 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
1139 ("<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-130211/">Open
1140 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support</a>"), about a
1141 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
1142 support. To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
1143 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
1144 feature request tickets tracking such feature. I got an answer from
1145 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
1146 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was. So I searched a bit
1147 more, and came across an independent
1148 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">VLC plugin to add
1149 bittorrent support</a>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
1150 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
1151 about.</p>
1152
1153 <p>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
1154 the git repository, with some modifications. After installing this
1155 package, I could stream videos from
1156 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> using VLC
1157 commands like this:</p>
1158
1159 <p><blockquote><pre>
1160 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
1161 </pre></blockquote></p>
1162
1163 <p>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
1164 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
1165 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it. It can take
1166 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
1167 what is going on from VLC. It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
1168 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
1169 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line. I
1170 have no idea why.</p>
1171
1172 <p>I have created a <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/890360">request for
1173 a new package in Debian (RFP)</a> and
1174 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/1">asked if
1175 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen</a>. Now we
1176 wait to see what come out of this. I do not want to maintain a
1177 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
1178 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this. But I
1179 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
1180 still maintaining the source. If you want to help, please update the
1181 RFP request or the upstream issue.</p>
1182
1183 <p>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.</p>
1184
1185 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1186 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1187 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1188
1189 </div>
1190 <div class="tags">
1191
1192
1193 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>.
1194
1195
1196 </div>
1197 </div>
1198 <div class="padding"></div>
1199
1200 <div class="entry">
1201 <div class="title">
1202 <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>
1203 </div>
1204 <div class="date">
1205 13th February 2018
1206 </div>
1207 <div class="body">
1208 <p>A new version of the
1209 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
1210 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
1211 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid). I hope you find it
1212 useful. It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
1213 enter testing tomorrow. See the
1214 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
1215 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features. Version 3.2
1216 was announced 6 days ago. We will try to get it into Debian as
1217 well.</p>
1218
1219 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
1220 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
1221 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
1222 in Debian.</p>
1223
1224 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1225 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1226 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1227
1228 </div>
1229 <div class="tags">
1230
1231
1232 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>.
1233
1234
1235 </div>
1236 </div>
1237 <div class="padding"></div>
1238
1239 <div class="entry">
1240 <div class="title">
1241 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html">How hard can æ, ø and å be?</a>
1242 </div>
1243 <div class="date">
1244 11th February 2018
1245 </div>
1246 <div class="body">
1247 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-02-11-peppes-unicode.jpeg" align="right"/>
1248
1249 <p>We write 2018, and it is 30 years since Unicode was introduced.
1250 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
1251 just work with any computer system. But it is apparently beyond reach
1252 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant. Recently I visited
1253 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
1254 Notice how 'ø' and 'å' are replaced with strange symbols in
1255 'Servitør', 'Å BETALE', 'Beløp pr. gjest', 'Takk for besøket.' and 'Vi
1256 gleder oss til å se deg igjen'.</p>
1257
1258 <p>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.</p>
1259
1260 <p>I removed personal and private information to be nice.</p>
1261
1262 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1263 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1264 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1265
1266 </div>
1267 <div class="tags">
1268
1269
1270 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1271
1272
1273 </div>
1274 </div>
1275 <div class="padding"></div>
1276
1277 <div class="entry">
1278 <div class="title">
1279 <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>
1280 </div>
1281 <div class="date">
1282 7th January 2018
1283 </div>
1284 <div class="body">
1285 <p>I've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
1286 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than 11,000 title IDs
1287 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far. Most of them (57%) are
1288 feature films from USA published before 1923. I've also tracked down
1289 more than 24,000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
1290 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher. According to the front
1291 web page for <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film
1292 Vault</A>, there are 44,000 public domain films, so I guess there are
1293 still some left to identify.</p>
1294
1295 <p>The complete data set is available from
1296 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
1297 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.
1298 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
1299 "product catalog" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
1300 but any source I find believable is used. I've so far had to throw
1301 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
1302 the movies listed.</p>
1303
1304 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
1305 far:</p>
1306
1307 <p><pre>
1308 2352 entries ( 66 unique) with and 15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
1309 2302 entries ( 120 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
1310 195 entries ( 63 unique) with and 200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
1311 89 entries ( 52 unique) with and 38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
1312 344 entries ( 28 unique) with and 655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
1313 668 entries ( 209 unique) with and 1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
1314 830 entries ( 21 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
1315 19 entries ( 19 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
1316 6822 entries ( 6669 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
1317 137 entries ( 0 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
1318 1205 entries ( 57 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
1319 84 entries ( 20 unique) with and 167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
1320 158 entries ( 135 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
1321 113 entries ( 4 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
1322 182 entries ( 100 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
1323 229 entries ( 87 unique) with and 1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
1324 44 entries ( 2 unique) with and 64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
1325 291 entries ( 33 unique) with and 474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
1326 211 entries ( 7 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
1327 1232 entries ( 57 unique) with and 1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
1328 46 entries ( 13 unique) with and 81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
1329 698 entries ( 64 unique) with and 118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
1330 1758 entries ( 882 unique) with and 3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
1331 16 entries ( 0 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
1332 63 entries ( 16 unique) with and 141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
1333 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 8724 only in one list, 24647 without IMDB title ID
1334 </pre></p>
1335
1336 <p> I keep finding more data sources. I found the cinemovies source
1337 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
1338 my list with 63 movies. Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
1339 repository if you are curious how the lists are created. Many of the
1340 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
1341 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
1342 if the year matches. This allow me to automatically use many lists of
1343 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
1344 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain. So far my
1345 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
1346 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
1347 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID. It would make the job of
1348 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.</p>
1349
1350 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1351 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1352 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1353
1354 </div>
1355 <div class="tags">
1356
1357
1358 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>.
1359
1360
1361 </div>
1362 </div>
1363 <div class="padding"></div>
1364
1365 <div class="entry">
1366 <div class="title">
1367 <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>
1368 </div>
1369 <div class="date">
1370 17th December 2017
1371 </div>
1372 <div class="body">
1373 <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
1374 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
1375 entered Debian Unstable. It consist of five packages,
1376 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
1377 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
1378 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
1379 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
1380 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
1381 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>. The last
1382 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday. This should make
1383 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
1384 3D printers. My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
1385 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
1386
1387 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
1388 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages. With the introduction
1389 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
1390 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa. If you own or have access to a 3D
1391 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
1392
1393 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
1394 team, flocking together on the
1395 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
1396 mailing list and the
1397 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
1398 IRC channel.</p>
1399
1400 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
1401 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
1402 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
1403
1404 </div>
1405 <div class="tags">
1406
1407
1408 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>.
1409
1410
1411 </div>
1412 </div>
1413 <div class="padding"></div>
1414
1415 <div class="entry">
1416 <div class="title">
1417 <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>
1418 </div>
1419 <div class="date">
1420 13th December 2017
1421 </div>
1422 <div class="body">
1423 <p>While looking at
1424 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
1425 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
1426 an idea occurred to me. The number of renewals are so few per year, it
1427 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
1428 the corresponding IMDB title ID. This would give the (presumably)
1429 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
1430 enter the public domain for the transcribed year. By fetching the
1431 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
1432 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
1433 are now in the public domain. For the year 1955 (which is the one I
1434 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
1435 21. For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
1436 500-600 pages. It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
1437 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
1438 time.</p>
1439
1440 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
1441 listed for 1955):</p>
1442
1443 <p><blockquote>
1444 ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
1445 Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
1446 10Jun55; R151558.
1447 </blockquote></p>
1448
1449 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
1450 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
1451 DDmmmYY). The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
1452 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found. I am not
1453 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
1454 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
1455
1456 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
1457 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
1458 movie title using for example
1459 <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>.
1460 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
1461 first renewal entry from 1955 is
1462 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
1463
1464 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
1465 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
1466 down IMDB title IDs. In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
1467 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
1468 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
1469 away. By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
1470 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
1471 be able to discover any typos introduced. But I will need help to
1472 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
1473 own. If you would like to help, please get in touch. Perhaps you can
1474 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
1475
1476 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
1477 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
1478 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
1479 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
1480 have copies of renewal for written works. I have not been able to find
1481 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far. Perhaps they exist
1482 somewhere?</p>
1483
1484 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
1485 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder. At least
1486 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
1487 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
1488 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
1489 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
1490 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
1491
1492 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1493 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1494 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1495
1496 </div>
1497 <div class="tags">
1498
1499
1500 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>.
1501
1502
1503 </div>
1504 </div>
1505 <div class="padding"></div>
1506
1507 <div class="entry">
1508 <div class="title">
1509 <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>
1510 </div>
1511 <div class="date">
1512 5th December 2017
1513 </div>
1514 <div class="body">
1515 <p>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
1516 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks">Empty Socks from
1517 1927</a>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library. At the
1518 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
1519 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
1520 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html">my
1521 reasoning to conclude</a> that it would would enter the Norwegian
1522 equivalent of the public domain in 2053, based on my understanding of
1523 Norwegian Copyright Law. But a few days ago, I came across
1524 <a href="http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham.4792291/">a
1525 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain</a>, at
1526 least in USA. The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
1527 November or Desember 1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
1528 registered its copyright that year. At that time, right holders of
1529 movies registered by the copyright office received government
1530 protection for there work for 28 years. After 28 years, the copyright
1531 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
1532 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
1533 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in 1956. Yet someone
1534 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
1535 protected. Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
1536 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
1537 entries. Ser.3 pt.12-13 v.9-12 1955-1958 Motion Pictures
1538 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1955r.html#film">available
1539 from the University of Pennsylvania</a>, neither in
1540 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=83;num=45">page
1541 45 for the first half of 1955</a>, nor in
1542 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=175;num=119">page
1543 119 for the second half of 1955</a>. It is of course possible that
1544 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake. Is
1545 there some way to rule out this possibility? Please help, and update
1546 the wikipedia page with your findings.
1547
1548 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1549 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1550 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1551
1552 </div>
1553 <div class="tags">
1554
1555
1556 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
1557
1558
1559 </div>
1560 </div>
1561 <div class="padding"></div>
1562
1563 <div class="entry">
1564 <div class="title">
1565 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html">Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive</a>
1566 </div>
1567 <div class="date">
1568 28th November 2017
1569 </div>
1570 <div class="body">
1571 <p>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
1572 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">the Internet Archive</a>, if the
1573 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate. In the
1574 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
1575 love letter to the future. The metadata in the Internet Archive could
1576 use a face lift for the future to love us back. Here is a proposal
1577 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
1578 today. I've been unable to find any document describing the various
1579 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
1580 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
1581 of the existing movies.</p>
1582
1583 <p>I have a few use cases in mind. First of all, I would like to be
1584 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
1585 without duplicates. I would further like to identify the IMDB title
1586 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
1587 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
1588 with my friends.</p>
1589
1590 <p>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
1591 archive
1592 (<a href="https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive">available
1593 from github</a>), to list as many of the good movies as possible. The
1594 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
1595 parameters:</p>
1596
1597 <p><pre>
1598 collection:moviesandfilms
1599 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
1600 AND -mediatype:collection
1601 AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
1602 AND year
1603 </pre></p>
1604
1605 <p>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
1606 because the 'year' field is missing. The 'year' field is populated by
1607 the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
1608 released (date or year). Two such examples are
1609 <a href="https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905">Ben Hur
1610 from 1905</a> and
1611 <a href="https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama">Caminandes
1612 2: Gran Dillama from 2013</a>, where the year metadata field is
1613 missing.</p>
1614
1615 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
1616 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
1617 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
1618 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
1619
1620 <dl>
1621
1622 <dt>mediatype</dt>
1623 <dd>Should be 'movie' for movies.</dd>
1624
1625 <dt>collection</dt>
1626 <dd>Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.</dd>
1627
1628 <dt>title</dt>
1629 <dd>The title of the movie, without the publication year.</dd>
1630
1631 <dt>date</dt>
1632 <dd>The data or year the movie was released. This make the movie show
1633 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
1634 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.</dd>
1635
1636 <dt>director</dt>
1637 <dd>The director of the movie. This make it easier to know if the
1638 correct movie is found in movie databases.</dd>
1639
1640 <dt>publisher</dt>
1641 <dd>The production company making the movie. Also useful for
1642 identifying the correct movie.</dd>
1643
1644 <dt>links</dt>
1645
1646 <dd>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: &lt;a
1647 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/"&gt;Movie in
1648 IMDB&lt;/a&gt;. This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
1649 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive. Other external
1650 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.</dd>
1651
1652 </dl>
1653
1654 <p>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
1655 example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
1656 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.</p>
1657
1658 <p>I created
1659 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
1660 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
1661 Archive</a>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
1662 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates). It would be great if
1663 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
1664 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
1665 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
1666 while before this happen. If you have uploaded movies into the
1667 Internet Archive, you can help. Please consider following my proposal
1668 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
1669 counted. :)</p>
1670
1671 <p>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
1672 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
1673 the Internet Archive. But there are lots of movies without a
1674 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
1675 (like for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes">the
1676 Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
1677 one Wikidata entry).</p>
1678
1679 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1680 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1681 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1682
1683 </div>
1684 <div class="tags">
1685
1686
1687 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>.
1688
1689
1690 </div>
1691 </div>
1692 <div class="padding"></div>
1693
1694 <div class="entry">
1695 <div class="title">
1696 <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>
1697 </div>
1698 <div class="date">
1699 18th November 2017
1700 </div>
1701 <div class="body">
1702 <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
1703 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
1704 check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
1705 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
1706 Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and
1707 identified a few more. The code used to extract information from
1708 various data sources is available in
1709 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
1710 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
1711
1712 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain
1713 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
1714 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
1715 year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
1716 graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect
1717 World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
1718 around 2010?</p>
1719
1720 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
1721
1722 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
1723 the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics
1724 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
1725
1726 <pre>
1727 249 entries ( 6 unique) with and 288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
1728 2301 entries ( 540 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
1729 830 entries ( 29 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
1730 2109 entries ( 377 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
1731 291 entries ( 122 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
1732 144 entries ( 135 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
1733 350 entries ( 1 unique) with and 801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
1734 4 entries ( 0 unique) with and 124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
1735 698 entries ( 119 unique) with and 118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
1736 8 entries ( 8 unique) with and 196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
1737 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
1738 </pre>
1739
1740 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
1741 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
1742 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
1743 movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I've seen examples of all these
1744 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based
1745 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
1746 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
1747
1748 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
1749 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have
1750 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
1751 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you
1752 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
1753 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
1754 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
1755
1756 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
1757 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page
1758 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
1759 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
1760 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
1761
1762 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1763 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1764 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1765
1766 </div>
1767 <div class="tags">
1768
1769
1770 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>.
1771
1772
1773 </div>
1774 </div>
1775 <div class="padding"></div>
1776
1777 <div class="entry">
1778 <div class="title">
1779 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
1780 </div>
1781 <div class="date">
1782 1st November 2017
1783 </div>
1784 <div class="body">
1785 <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
1786 find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I
1787 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
1788
1789 <ul>
1790
1791 <li>USENIX :login; <a
1792 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
1793 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance. Analysis of Distributed Storage
1794 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
1795 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
1796 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
1797
1798 <li>ZDNet
1799 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
1800 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
1801
1802 <li>ZDNet
1803 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
1804 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
1805
1806 <li>USENIX FAST'07
1807 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
1808 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
1809 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
1810
1811 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
1812 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
1813 Integrity. Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
1814 Hughes</li>
1815
1816 <li>USENIX FAST'08
1817 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
1818 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
1819 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
1820 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
1821
1822 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
1823 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
1824 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
1825 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
1826
1827 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
1828 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
1829 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive
1830 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
1831 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
1832
1833 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
1834 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
1835 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
1836 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
1837
1838 </ul>
1839
1840 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
1841 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
1842 opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
1843 redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there
1844 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both
1845 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
1846 practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like
1847 Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know
1848 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
1849 never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds
1850 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
1851
1852 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
1853 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
1854 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
1855
1856 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1857 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1858 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1859
1860 </div>
1861 <div class="tags">
1862
1863
1864 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>.
1865
1866
1867 </div>
1868 </div>
1869 <div class="padding"></div>
1870
1871 <div class="entry">
1872 <div class="title">
1873 <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>
1874 </div>
1875 <div class="date">
1876 31st October 2017
1877 </div>
1878 <div class="body">
1879 <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
1880 know there are easily available web services available for writing
1881 LaTeX documents as a team. I thought it was common knowledge, but to
1882 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
1883 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents. Some of them even
1884 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
1885
1886 <p>There are two commercial services available,
1887 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
1888 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>. They are very easy to
1889 use. Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
1890 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing. Note, these two
1891 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
1892 one joint service. I've used both for different documents, and they
1893 work just fine. While
1894 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
1895 software</a>, while the latter is not. According to <a
1896 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
1897 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
1898 base maintained as free software.</p>
1899
1900 But these two are not the only alternatives.
1901 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
1902 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
1903 source available on github</a>. I have not used it myself. Several
1904 others can be found on the nice
1905 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
1906 web service</a>.
1907
1908 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
1909 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services. You can even
1910 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
1911
1912 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1913 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1914 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1915
1916 </div>
1917 <div class="tags">
1918
1919
1920 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1921
1922
1923 </div>
1924 </div>
1925 <div class="padding"></div>
1926
1927 <div class="entry">
1928 <div class="title">
1929 <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>
1930 </div>
1931 <div class="date">
1932 25th October 2017
1933 </div>
1934 <div class="body">
1935 <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
1936 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
1937 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
1938 to can be freely distributed on the Internet. This proved to be
1939 harder than it sounds. IMDB for sure list movies without any
1940 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
1941 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
1942 Creative Commons. These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
1943 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
1944 the information in IMDB.</p>
1945
1946 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
1947 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
1948 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
1949 feel how to do this. It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
1950 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
1951 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie. As I needed to check
1952 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable. I simply
1953 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
1954 set.</p>
1955
1956 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
1957 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
1958 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
1959 metadata. Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
1960 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
1961 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
1962
1963 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
1964 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
1965 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
1966 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
1967 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID. This is useful based on the
1968 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
1969 legally distributed on the Internet. With some help from the RDF
1970 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
1971 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
1972 Wikidata</a>:
1973
1974 <p><pre>
1975 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
1976 WHERE
1977 {
1978 ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
1979 ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
1980 ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
1981 OPTIONAL {
1982 ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
1983 ?work rdfs:label ?label.
1984 FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
1985 }
1986 }
1987 </pre></p>
1988
1989 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
1990 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
1991 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
1992 of the latter two are available. At the moment the result set contain
1993 2338 entries. Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
1994 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
1995 for the movie. It should be noted that the result will include
1996 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages. There are
1997 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
1998 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
1999 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
2000 automatically.</p>
2001
2002 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
2003 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
2004 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
2005 free movies and their IMDB ID. In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
2006 the refered Internet Archive entry. I assume the 70 "disappearing"
2007 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
2008
2009 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
2010 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
2011 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
2012 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
2013 on Wikipedia.</p>
2014
2015 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
2016 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
2017 years:<p>
2018
2019 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
2020
2021 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
2022 be similar.</p>
2023
2024 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
2025 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
2026 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
2027 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
2028
2029 <p><pre>
2030 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
2031 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
2032 </pre></p>
2033
2034 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
2035 introduce a typo.</p>
2036
2037 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
2038 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
2039 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
2040 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
2041 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
2042 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
2043 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
2044 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
2045 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
2046 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
2047 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
2048 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
2049 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
2050 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
2051 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
2052 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
2053 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
2054 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
2055 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
2056 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
2057 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
2058 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
2059 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
2060 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
2061 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
2062 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
2063 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
2064 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
2065 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
2066 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
2067 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
2068 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
2069 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
2070 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
2071 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
2072 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
2073 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
2074 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
2075 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
2076 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
2077 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
2078 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
2079 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
2080 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
2081 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
2082 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
2083 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
2084 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
2085 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
2086 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
2087 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
2088 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
2089 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
2090 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
2091 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
2092 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
2093 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
2094 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
2095 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
2096 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
2097 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
2098 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
2099 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
2100 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
2101 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
2102 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
2103 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
2104 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
2105 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
2106 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
2107 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
2108 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
2109 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
2110 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
2111 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
2112 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
2113 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
2114 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
2115 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
2116 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
2117 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
2118 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
2119 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
2120 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
2121 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
2122 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
2123 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
2124 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
2125 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
2126 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
2127 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
2128 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
2129 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513">Q324513</a>,
2130 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172">Q374172</a>,
2131 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269">Q7533269</a>,
2132 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386">Q970386</a>,
2133 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849">Q976849</a>,
2134 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614">Q7458614</a>,
2135 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416">Q5347416</a>,
2136 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005">Q5460005</a>,
2137 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392">Q5463392</a>,
2138 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555">Q3038555</a>,
2139 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458">Q5288458</a>,
2140 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516">Q2346516</a>,
2141 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645">Q5183645</a>,
2142 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497">Q5185497</a>,
2143 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127">Q5216127</a>,
2144 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127">Q5223127</a>,
2145 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159">Q5261159</a>,
2146 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759">Q1300759</a>,
2147 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241">Q5521241</a>,
2148 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434">Q7733434</a>,
2149 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264">Q7736264</a>,
2150 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032">Q7737032</a>,
2151 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671">Q7882671</a>,
2152 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427">Q7719427</a>,
2153 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444">Q7719444</a>,
2154 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575">Q7722575</a>,
2155 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763">Q2629763</a>,
2156 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346">Q2640346</a>,
2157 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2649671">Q2649671</a>,
2158 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7703851">Q7703851</a>,
2159 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7747041">Q7747041</a>,
2160 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6544949">Q6544949</a>,
2161 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6672759">Q6672759</a>,
2162 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2445896">Q2445896</a>,
2163 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12124891">Q12124891</a>,
2164 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3127044">Q3127044</a>,
2165 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262">Q2511262</a>,
2166 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672">Q2517672</a>,
2167 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165">Q2543165</a>,
2168 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
2169 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
2170 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12126890">Q12126890</a>,
2171 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
2172 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
2173 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
2174 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
2175 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559509">Q2559509</a>,
2176 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559912">Q2559912</a>,
2177 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7760469">Q7760469</a>,
2178 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6703974">Q6703974</a>,
2179 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4744">Q4744</a>,
2180 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7766962">Q7766962</a>,
2181 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7768516">Q7768516</a>,
2182 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769205">Q7769205</a>,
2183 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769988">Q7769988</a>,
2184 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2946945">Q2946945</a>,
2185 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
2186 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
2187 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
2188 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
2189 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
2190 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6909175">Q6909175</a>,
2191 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7405709">Q7405709</a>,
2192 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149">Q7416149</a>,
2193 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952">Q7239952</a>,
2194 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332">Q7317332</a>,
2195 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674">Q7783674</a>,
2196 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704">Q7783704</a>,
2197 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590">Q7857590</a>,
2198 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372526">Q3372526</a>,
2199 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372642">Q3372642</a>,
2200 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372816">Q3372816</a>,
2201 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909">Q3372909</a>,
2202 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649">Q7959649</a>,
2203 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485">Q7977485</a>,
2204 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684">Q7992684</a>,
2205 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966">Q3817966</a>,
2206 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852">Q3821852</a>,
2207 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907">Q3420907</a>,
2208 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733">Q3429733</a>,
2209 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
2210
2211 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2212 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2213 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2214
2215 </div>
2216 <div class="tags">
2217
2218
2219 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>.
2220
2221
2222 </div>
2223 </div>
2224 <div class="padding"></div>
2225
2226 <div class="entry">
2227 <div class="title">
2228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
2229 </div>
2230 <div class="date">
2231 14th October 2017
2232 </div>
2233 <div class="body">
2234 <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
2235 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea. The
2236 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
2237 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
2238 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
2239 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
2240 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
2241 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
2242 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
2243
2244 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
2245 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
2246 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
2247
2248 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2249 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2250 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2251
2252 </div>
2253 <div class="tags">
2254
2255
2256 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2257
2258
2259 </div>
2260 </div>
2261 <div class="padding"></div>
2262
2263 <div class="entry">
2264 <div class="title">
2265 <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>
2266 </div>
2267 <div class="date">
2268 9th October 2017
2269 </div>
2270 <div class="body">
2271 <p>At my nearby maker space,
2272 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
2273 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
2274 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
2275 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
2276 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying,
2277 as the software involved,
2278 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
2279 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
2280 the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found
2281 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
2282 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
2283 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days
2284 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
2285
2286 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
2287 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
2288 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress
2289 on
2290 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2291 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
2292
2293 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
2294 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
2295 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
2296 upstream version.</p>
2297
2298 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
2299 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
2300 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking
2301 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
2302 Debian, check out
2303 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
2304 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
2305 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
2306
2307 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2308 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2309 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2310
2311 </div>
2312 <div class="tags">
2313
2314
2315 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>.
2316
2317
2318 </div>
2319 </div>
2320 <div class="padding"></div>
2321
2322 <div class="entry">
2323 <div class="title">
2324 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
2325 </div>
2326 <div class="date">
2327 29th September 2017
2328 </div>
2329 <div class="body">
2330 <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
2331 mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone
2332 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the
2333 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
2334 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The
2335 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
2336 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying
2337 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
2338 an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more
2339 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
2340 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
2341 listen.</p>
2342
2343 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
2344 visualizing this information up and running for
2345 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
2346 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
2347 library. The solution is based on the
2348 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
2349 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
2350 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
2351 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
2352 Oslo</a>. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
2353 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
2354 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
2355 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
2356
2357 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
2358 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
2359 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
2360 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
2361 Hopglass</a>. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
2362 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
2363 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
2364 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
2365
2366 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
2367 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
2368 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
2369 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
2370 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>. For some reason we could not get
2371 more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying
2372 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
2373 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
2374 believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
2375 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
2376 mentioned in
2377 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
2378 issue for the topic</a>.
2379
2380 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
2381
2382 </div>
2383 <div class="tags">
2384
2385
2386 Tags: <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>.
2387
2388
2389 </div>
2390 </div>
2391 <div class="padding"></div>
2392
2393 <div class="entry">
2394 <div class="title">
2395 <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>
2396 </div>
2397 <div class="date">
2398 24th September 2017
2399 </div>
2400 <div class="body">
2401 <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
2402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
2403 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
2404 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
2405 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
2406 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
2407 accuracy of a few kilometer. Since then we have worked to make the
2408 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
2409 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
2410
2411 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
2412 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
2413 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
2414 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
2415
2416 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
2417 clone of two python scripts:</p>
2418
2419 <ol>
2420
2421 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
2422 testing).</li>
2423
2424 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
2425 python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
2426
2427 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
2428 github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
2429
2430 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
2431
2432 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
2433 scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
2434 stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
2435
2436 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
2437 simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
2438
2439 </ol>
2440
2441 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
2442 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
2443 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio. It does
2444 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
2445 very cheaply
2446 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
2447 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
2448 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
2449
2450 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
2451 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
2452 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
2453 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
2454 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers. Further, I am not sure if
2455 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
2456 this approach might not see all phones around you. I typically see
2457 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
2458
2459 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
2460 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
2461 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
2462 to be too CPU intensive to keep up. When GNU Radio print 'O' to
2463 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
2464 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
2465 GSM data fast enough. If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
2466 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
2467 CPU power. Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
2468 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers? I tried
2469 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
2470 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
2471
2472 </div>
2473 <div class="tags">
2474
2475
2476 Tags: <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>.
2477
2478
2479 </div>
2480 </div>
2481 <div class="padding"></div>
2482
2483 <div class="entry">
2484 <div class="title">
2485 <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>
2486 </div>
2487 <div class="date">
2488 9th August 2017
2489 </div>
2490 <div class="body">
2491 <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
2492 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
2493 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
2494 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
2495 DVB-T software defined radios. The article refered to instructions
2496 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
2497 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
2498
2499 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
2500 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
2501 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
2502 scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
2503 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
2504 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
2505 some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe
2506 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
2507 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
2508 gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
2509 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
2510 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to
2511 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
2512
2513 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
2514 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
2515 packages with IMSI numbers in them. The code is fairly short and easy
2516 to understand. The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
2517 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
2518 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
2519 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
2520 default). This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
2521 collector for a few days now.</p>
2522
2523 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
2524
2525 <ol>
2526
2527 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
2528
2529 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
2530 <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>
2531
2532 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
2533
2534 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
2535 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
2536 found a GSM station).</li>
2537
2538 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
2539
2540 </ol>
2541
2542 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
2543 running, I decided to package
2544 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
2545 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
2546 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
2547 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
2548 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
2549
2550 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
2551 commercial tools like
2552 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
2553 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
2554 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
2555 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
2556 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
2557 is easily tracked. Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
2558 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
2559 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
2560 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
2561 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
2562 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
2563 of government officials...</p>
2564
2565 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
2566 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
2567 the GSM network. It will only collect one frequency at the time,
2568 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
2569 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
2570 program. Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
2571 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
2572 parser code. I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
2573 one frequency?</p>
2574
2575 </div>
2576 <div class="tags">
2577
2578
2579 Tags: <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>.
2580
2581
2582 </div>
2583 </div>
2584 <div class="padding"></div>
2585
2586 <div class="entry">
2587 <div class="title">
2588 <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>
2589 </div>
2590 <div class="date">
2591 25th July 2017
2592 </div>
2593 <div class="body">
2594 <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
2595
2596 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
2597 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
2598 Handbook</a>". This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
2599 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand. We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
2600 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
2601 from lulu.com</a>. If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
2602 price. The book is also available for download in electronic form as
2603 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
2604 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
2605 as a web page</a>.</p>
2606
2607 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
2608 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
2609 in
2610 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
2611 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
2612 and
2613 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
2614 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
2615 project. I hope
2616 "<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
2617 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
2618
2619 </div>
2620 <div class="tags">
2621
2622
2623 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>.
2624
2625
2626 </div>
2627 </div>
2628 <div class="padding"></div>
2629
2630 <div class="entry">
2631 <div class="title">
2632 <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>
2633 </div>
2634 <div class="date">
2635 12th June 2017
2636 </div>
2637 <div class="body">
2638 <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
2639 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
2640 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
2641 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated. I had a look at the
2642 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today. Not too impressive,
2643 but happy to see some buyers still exist. All the revenue from the
2644 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
2645 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
2646 directly from Lulu. Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
2647 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu. The ebook
2648 edition is available for free from
2649 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
2650
2651 <table border="0">
2652 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
2653 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
2654
2655 <tr>
2656 <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
2657 <td align="right">3</td>
2658 <td align="right">6</td>
2659 <td align="right">15</td>
2660 </tr>
2661
2662 <tr>
2663 <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
2664 <td align="right">7</td>
2665 <td align="right">1</td>
2666 <td align="right">0</td>
2667 </tr>
2668
2669 <tr>
2670 <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
2671 <td align="right">14</td>
2672 <td align="right">27</td>
2673 <td align="right">16</td>
2674 </tr>
2675
2676 <tr>
2677 <td>Total</td>
2678 <td align="right">24</td>
2679 <td align="right">34</td>
2680 <td align="right">31</td>
2681 </tr>
2682
2683 </table>
2684
2685 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
2686 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
2687
2688 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
2689 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
2690 touch.</p>
2691
2692 </div>
2693 <div class="tags">
2694
2695
2696 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>.
2697
2698
2699 </div>
2700 </div>
2701 <div class="padding"></div>
2702
2703 <div class="entry">
2704 <div class="title">
2705 <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>
2706 </div>
2707 <div class="date">
2708 10th June 2017
2709 </div>
2710 <div class="body">
2711 <p>I am very happy to report that the
2712 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
2713 core project</a> tagged its second release today. The free software
2714 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
2715 5 used by government offices in Norway. These were the changes in
2716 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
2717
2718 <ul>
2719
2720 <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
2721 <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
2722 correspondencepartInternal</li>
2723 <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
2724 regualr basis.</li>
2725 <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
2726 <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
2727 available via URLs in _links.</li>
2728 <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
2729 <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
2730 <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
2731 <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
2732 <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
2733 <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
2734 <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
2735 <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
2736 <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
2737 <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
2738 <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
2739 <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
2740 <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
2741 <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
2742 <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
2743 style.</li>
2744 <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
2745 <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
2746 <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
2747 <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
2748 to the official names.</li>
2749 <li>...</li>
2750
2751 </ul>
2752
2753 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
2754 on irc.freenode.net) or email
2755 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
2756 mailing list).</p>
2757
2758 </div>
2759 <div class="tags">
2760
2761
2762 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>.
2763
2764
2765 </div>
2766 </div>
2767 <div class="padding"></div>
2768
2769 <div class="entry">
2770 <div class="title">
2771 <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>
2772 </div>
2773 <div class="date">
2774 7th June 2017
2775 </div>
2776 <div class="body">
2777 <p><em>This is a copy of
2778 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
2779 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>. Please follow up
2780 there if you would like to discuss this topic. The background is that
2781 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
2782 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
2783 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
2784
2785 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
2786 stored in Noark 5.
2787 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
2788 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
2789 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
2790 specific time in the past. This is useful to verify the integrity of
2791 the documents in the archive.</p>
2792
2793 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
2794 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
2795 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
2796 stamping?</p>
2797
2798 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
2799 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
2800 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
2801 attributes:</p>
2802
2803 <ul>
2804
2805 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
2806 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
2807 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
2808 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
2809
2810 </ul>
2811
2812 <p>This assume a service following
2813 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
2814 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
2815 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp. As far as I can
2816 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
2817 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
2818 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt. It might be stretching it a bit to make
2819 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
2820 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
2821 itself.</p>
2822
2823 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
2824 timestamping services to be used. This is useful to spread the risk
2825 of key compromise over several organisations. It would only be a
2826 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
2827 compromised.</p>
2828
2829 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
2830 file. $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
2831 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
2832 above).</p>
2833
2834 <p><blockquote><pre>
2835 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
2836 | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
2837 --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
2838 </pre></blockquote></p>
2839
2840 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
2841 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
2842
2843 <p><blockquote><pre>
2844 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
2845 https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
2846 </pre></blockquote></p>
2847
2848 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
2849 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now. It
2850 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
2851 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
2852 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
2853
2854 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
2855
2856 <p><blockquote><pre>
2857 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
2858 -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
2859 </pre></blockquote></p>
2860
2861 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work? Is it somehow against
2862 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
2863
2864 </div>
2865 <div class="tags">
2866
2867
2868 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>.
2869
2870
2871 </div>
2872 </div>
2873 <div class="padding"></div>
2874
2875 <div class="entry">
2876 <div class="title">
2877 <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>
2878 </div>
2879 <div class="date">
2880 19th March 2017
2881 </div>
2882 <div class="body">
2883 <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
2884 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
2885 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
2886 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
2887 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
2888 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
2889 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
2890 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I've been involved
2891 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
2892 Unix User Group
2893 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
2894 it supported the project</a>. I believe this is an important project,
2895 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
2896 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
2897 on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
2898 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
2899 from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in
2900 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
2901 itches.</p>
2902
2903 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
2904 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
2905 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
2906 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
2907 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
2908 project mailing list</a>.</p>
2909
2910 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
2911 documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
2912 became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I
2913 completed an implementation of a command line tool
2914 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
2915 API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
2916 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
2917 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
2918 one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
2919 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The
2920 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
2921 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is
2922 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
2923 our API tester:</p>
2924
2925 <p><blockquote><pre>
2926 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
2927 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2928 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2929
2930 0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2931 1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2932 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
2933 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
2934 PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
2935 File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2936 ~/src//noark5-tester$
2937 </pre></blockquote></p>
2938
2939 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
2940 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
2941 among the two created by the API tester. The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
2942 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
2943
2944 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
2945 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
2946 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base. The API
2947 tester currently use
2948 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
2949 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
2950 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
2951 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
2952 store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
2953 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
2954 specification.</p>
2955
2956 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
2957 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
2958 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
2959 and we have
2960 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
2961 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it. We use a
2962 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
2963 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
2964 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
2965 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> :).
2966
2967 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
2968 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
2969 that want to test the current code base. The API tester is
2970 implemented in Python.</p>
2971
2972 </div>
2973 <div class="tags">
2974
2975
2976 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>.
2977
2978
2979 </div>
2980 </div>
2981 <div class="padding"></div>
2982
2983 <div class="entry">
2984 <div class="title">
2985 <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>
2986 </div>
2987 <div class="date">
2988 9th March 2017
2989 </div>
2990 <div class="body">
2991 <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
2992 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
2993 was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
2994 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
2995 shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without
2996 risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been
2997 obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is
2998 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
2999
3000 <p><blockquote>
3001 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
3002 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
3003 </blockquote></p>
3004
3005 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
3006 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other
3007 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
3008 are noticed.</p>
3009
3010 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
3011 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
3012 it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
3013 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a
3014 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
3015 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
3016
3017 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
3018 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
3019 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
3020 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
3021 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
3022 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
3023
3024 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
3025
3026 <p><blockquote><pre>
3027 [...]
3028 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
3029 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
3030 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
3031 age: 7863311
3032 caps: caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
3033 sec: flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
3034 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
3035 bytes: 166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
3036 RPC iostats version: 1.0 p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
3037 xprt: tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
3038 per-op statistics
3039 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3040 GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
3041 SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
3042 LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
3043 ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
3044 READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
3045 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
3046 WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
3047 CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
3048 MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
3049 SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
3050 MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
3051 REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
3052 RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
3053 RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
3054 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
3055 READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
3056 READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
3057 FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
3058 FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
3059 PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
3060 COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3061
3062 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
3063 [...]
3064 </pre></blockquote></p>
3065
3066 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
3067 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
3068 operation. Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts. If these
3069 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
3070 hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
3071 away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
3072 while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the
3073 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
3074 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
3075 mount options.</p>
3076
3077 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
3078 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
3079 But according to
3080 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
3081 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
3082 command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work
3083 on Linux, as far as I can tell. I
3084 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
3085 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
3086
3087 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
3088 experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are
3089 affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
3090 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very
3091 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
3092
3093 </div>
3094 <div class="tags">
3095
3096
3097 Tags: <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>.
3098
3099
3100 </div>
3101 </div>
3102 <div class="padding"></div>
3103
3104 <div class="entry">
3105 <div class="title">
3106 <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>
3107 </div>
3108 <div class="date">
3109 8th March 2017
3110 </div>
3111 <div class="body">
3112 <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
3113 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
3114 before he was elected president. He even claim this must be illegal.
3115 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
3116 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
3117 way or another. Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
3118 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
3119
3120 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
3121 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
3122 wiretapped illegally. I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
3123 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
3124 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
3125 world.</p>
3126
3127 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
3128 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump. That is not very
3129 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
3130 secret. Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
3131
3132 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
3133 present it. In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
3134 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
3135 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
3136 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'. There is a fundamental and
3137 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
3138 unable to grasp it.</p>
3139
3140 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
3141 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
3142 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
3143
3144 </div>
3145 <div class="tags">
3146
3147
3148 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>.
3149
3150
3151 </div>
3152 </div>
3153 <div class="padding"></div>
3154
3155 <div class="entry">
3156 <div class="title">
3157 <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>
3158 </div>
3159 <div class="date">
3160 3rd March 2017
3161 </div>
3162 <div class="body">
3163 <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
3164 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
3165 Administrator's Handbook</a>. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
3166 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
3167 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
3168 use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book
3169 available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to
3170 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
3171 to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
3172
3173 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
3174
3175 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
3176 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
3177 proofreading. If you find any errors, please
3178 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
3179 Weblate and correct the error</a>. The
3180 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
3181 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
3182 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
3183
3184 </div>
3185 <div class="tags">
3186
3187
3188 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>.
3189
3190
3191 </div>
3192 </div>
3193 <div class="padding"></div>
3194
3195 <div class="entry">
3196 <div class="title">
3197 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
3198 </div>
3199 <div class="date">
3200 1st March 2017
3201 </div>
3202 <div class="body">
3203 <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
3204 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
3205 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
3206 Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
3207 work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
3208 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a
3209 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
3210 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small
3211 test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level,
3212 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
3213 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3214
3215 <blockquote><pre>
3216 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3217 dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3218 for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3219 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3220 sleep 1; \
3221 done
3222 300
3223 0+1 oppføringer inn
3224 0+1 oppføringer ut
3225 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
3226 4
3227 8
3228 12
3229 17
3230 21
3231 %
3232 </pre></blockquote>
3233
3234 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second. In such case any
3235 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
3236 will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with
3237 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3238
3239 <blockquote><pre>
3240 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3241 dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3242 for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3243 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3244 sleep 1; \
3245 done
3246 1079
3247 0+1 oppføringer inn
3248 0+1 oppføringer ut
3249 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
3250 433
3251 1028
3252 1031
3253 1035
3254 1038
3255 %
3256 </pre></blockquote>
3257
3258 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
3259 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
3260
3261 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might
3262 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
3263 recording illuminating</a>. It explains exactly what the source of
3264 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
3265 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
3266 post.</p>
3267
3268 </div>
3269 <div class="tags">
3270
3271
3272 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3273
3274
3275 </div>
3276 </div>
3277 <div class="padding"></div>
3278
3279 <div class="entry">
3280 <div class="title">
3281 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
3282 </div>
3283 <div class="date">
3284 21st February 2017
3285 </div>
3286 <div class="body">
3287 <p>I just noticed
3288 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
3289 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
3290 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
3291 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
3292 storage. Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
3293 pre-approval from the National Archive. Allowing OOXML files to be
3294 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
3295 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
3296 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
3297 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
3298
3299 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
3300 undefined behaviour? It would be useful for the National Archive (and
3301 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
3302 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
3303 OOXML. I'm aware of the
3304 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
3305 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
3306 report use of undefined behaviour. Are there other similar tools
3307 available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
3308
3309 </div>
3310 <div class="tags">
3311
3312
3313 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>.
3314
3315
3316 </div>
3317 </div>
3318 <div class="padding"></div>
3319
3320 <div class="entry">
3321 <div class="title">
3322 <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>
3323 </div>
3324 <div class="date">
3325 13th February 2017
3326 </div>
3327 <div class="body">
3328 <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
3329 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
3330 day in court</a>. The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
3331 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no. The ruling simply did not mention
3332 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
3333 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations. But it is
3334 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
3335 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
3336 of the claims made in court by the opposition. We are considering an
3337 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
3338 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer. If you want to help, please
3339 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
3340 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
3341
3342 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
3343 Norwegian from
3344 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
3345 blog</a>. This also include
3346 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
3347 ruling itself</a>.</p>
3348
3349 </div>
3350 <div class="tags">
3351
3352
3353 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>.
3354
3355
3356 </div>
3357 </div>
3358 <div class="padding"></div>
3359
3360 <div class="entry">
3361 <div class="title">
3362 <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>
3363 </div>
3364 <div class="date">
3365 3rd February 2017
3366 </div>
3367 <div class="body">
3368 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
3369
3370 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
3371 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
3372 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
3373 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
3374 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no. It
3375 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
3376 life. Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
3377 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
3378 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
3379
3380 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
3381 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
3382 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
3383 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
3384 year, without following
3385 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
3386 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
3387 court decision. The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
3388 Time. And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
3389 and illegal applications. Popcorn Time is a client combining
3390 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
3391 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
3392 downloaded content on screen. It can be used illegally if it is used
3393 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
3394 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
3395 millions of movies
3396 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
3397 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
3398 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>. We created
3399 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
3400 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
3401 Court. It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
3402
3403 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court. The
3404 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
3405 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all. We will
3406 know in two weeks time. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
3407 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
3408 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
3409 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
3410 associations. It is expensive to be right also in Norway. So far the
3411 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-. To help fund the case, NUUG
3412 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
3413 000,- so far. Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
3414 the government to appeal if the case go our way. And if the case do
3415 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
3416
3417 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim. On the benches,
3418 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
3419 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
3420 quite sure who was. Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
3421 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
3422 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
3423 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway. All
3424 seven appeared to know each other. Good to see the case is take
3425 seriously.</p>
3426
3427 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
3428 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
3429 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
3430 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
3431 the NUUG defense fund</a>. Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
3432 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
3433 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
3434 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
3435 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
3436
3437 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
3438 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
3439 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>. They cover the legal arguments
3440 on both sides.</p>
3441
3442 </div>
3443 <div class="tags">
3444
3445
3446 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>.
3447
3448
3449 </div>
3450 </div>
3451 <div class="padding"></div>
3452
3453 <div class="entry">
3454 <div class="title">
3455 <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>
3456 </div>
3457 <div class="date">
3458 9th January 2017
3459 </div>
3460 <div class="body">
3461 <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
3462 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
3463 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
3464 is hard to find all the details. Many years ago, I wrote a system to
3465 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
3466 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
3467 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users. Back
3468 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
3469 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
3470 graph and the map. The output from traceroute typically look like
3471 this:
3472
3473 <p><pre>
3474 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
3475 1 uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1) 0.447 ms 0.486 ms 0.621 ms
3476 2 uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229) 0.467 ms 0.578 ms 0.675 ms
3477 3 oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17) 0.385 ms 0.373 ms 0.358 ms
3478 4 te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3) 1.174 ms 1.172 ms 1.153 ms
3479 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
3480 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
3481 7 89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146) 0.931 ms 0.917 ms 0.955 ms
3482 8 * * *
3483 9 * * *
3484 [...]
3485 </pre></p>
3486
3487 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
3488 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
3489 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
3490 package to reach the equipment and return to me. Three packages are
3491 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path. This
3492 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
3493 traceroute request.</p>
3494
3495 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes. Other good traceroute
3496 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
3497 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
3498 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities). All of them are easily
3499 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
3500
3501 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
3502 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
3503 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe. The
3504 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
3505 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
3506 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content. This will
3507 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
3508 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
3509 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
3510
3511 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
3512 www.stortinget.no. It is read daily by all members of parliament and
3513 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
3514 citizens of Norway. A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
3515 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
3516 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
3517 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
3518 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se. I extracted this by
3519 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
3520 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
3521 render the page (in HAR format using
3522 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
3523 netsniff example</a>. I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
3524 to do this). My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
3525 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
3526 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
3527
3528 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
3529 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>
3530
3531 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
3532 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
3533 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP. KML
3534 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
3535 of the GIS tools I have available. I got good help from by NUUG
3536 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
3537 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
3538 kmltraceroute git repository</a>. Unfortunately, the quality of the
3539 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
3540 friends had access to) is not up to the task. The IP addresses of
3541 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
3542 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
3543 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
3544 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
3545
3546 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
3547 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>
3548
3549 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
3550 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
3551 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
3552 question.
3553 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
3554 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
3555 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
3556 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation. This graph
3557 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
3558 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
3559 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
3560
3561 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
3562 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>
3563
3564 <p>In the process, I came across the
3565 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
3566 Salim Gasmi. Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
3567 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
3568 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
3569 geolocation. But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
3570 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
3571 for postprocessing. So I contacted the developer and asked if he
3572 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
3573 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
3574 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway. So
3575 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
3576 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
3577 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
3578 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
3579
3580 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
3581 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>
3582
3583 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
3584 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland. Plenty of places where the
3585 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
3586 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
3587
3588 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
3589 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
3590 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
3591 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
3592 behind the DNS name is traced this time. To get them all, one would
3593 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
3594 GeoTraceroute). That might be the next step in this project.</p>
3595
3596 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
3597 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
3598 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
3599 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
3600 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe. (Hm, what should
3601 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
3602 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
3603
3604 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
3605 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
3606 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
3607 Marble. There are heaps of other options too.</p>
3608
3609 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3610 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3611 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3612
3613 </div>
3614 <div class="tags">
3615
3616
3617 Tags: <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>.
3618
3619
3620 </div>
3621 </div>
3622 <div class="padding"></div>
3623
3624 <div class="entry">
3625 <div class="title">
3626 <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>
3627 </div>
3628 <div class="date">
3629 4th January 2017
3630 </div>
3631 <div class="body">
3632 <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
3633 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
3634 space and resources? At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
3635 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
3636 entries are in the set. While working on migrating our calendars to a
3637 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
3638 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
3639 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
3640 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool. I spent a few
3641 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
3642 consumption. The
3643 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
3644 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
3645 github. The system is written in Python and depend on
3646 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
3647 module</a>.</p>
3648
3649 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
3650 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script. This will
3651 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
3652 all components expiring more than two years in the past. The vevent,
3653 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script. The remaining
3654 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
3655
3656 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
3657
3658 <p><pre>
3659 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
3660 Found 3612 vevents
3661 Found 6 vtodos
3662 Found 2 vjournals
3663 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
3664 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
3665 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
3666 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
3667 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
3668 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
3669 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
3670 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
3671 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
3672 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
3673 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
3674 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
3675 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
3676 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
3677 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
3678 %
3679 </pre></p>
3680
3681 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
3682 written with names derived from the original file. If you are happy
3683 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
3684 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
3685 collections.</p>
3686
3687 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit. The error handling
3688 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
3689 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
3690 not. The program is thus likely to change. If you find it
3691 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
3692
3693 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3694 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3695 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3696
3697 </div>
3698 <div class="tags">
3699
3700
3701 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>.
3702
3703
3704 </div>
3705 </div>
3706 <div class="padding"></div>
3707
3708 <div class="entry">
3709 <div class="title">
3710 <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>
3711 </div>
3712 <div class="date">
3713 23rd December 2016
3714 </div>
3715 <div class="body">
3716 <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular
3717 readers probably know, I have been working on the
3718 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
3719 system</a> for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
3720 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
3721 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
3722 to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database,
3723 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
3724 metadata format. And today,
3725 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
3726 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
3727 ie using fnmatch():</p>
3728
3729 <p><pre>
3730 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
3731 usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3732 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
3733 Name: pymissile
3734 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
3735 Package: pymissile
3736 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
3737 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
3738 Name: libnxt
3739 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
3740 Package: libnxt
3741 ---
3742 Identifier: t2n [generic]
3743 Name: t2n
3744 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
3745 Package: t2n
3746 ---
3747 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
3748 Name: python-nxt
3749 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
3750 Package: python-nxt
3751 ---
3752 Identifier: nbc [generic]
3753 Name: nbc
3754 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
3755 Package: nbc
3756 %
3757 </pre></p>
3758
3759 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
3760 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
3761
3762 <p><pre>
3763 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3764 pymissile
3765 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
3766 libnxt
3767 nbc
3768 python-nxt
3769 t2n
3770 %
3771 </pre></p>
3772
3773 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
3774 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
3775
3776 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
3777 make the most of the hardware they have, please
3778 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
3779 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
3780 documented in the wiki. So far only 11 packages provide such
3781 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
3782 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
3783 mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware
3784 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
3785 part of my involvement in
3786 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
3787 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
3788 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The
3789 team also got a nice Christmas present today. The
3790 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
3791 package</a> made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is
3792 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
3793 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
3794 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
3795
3796 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3797 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3798 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3799
3800 </div>
3801 <div class="tags">
3802
3803
3804 Tags: <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>.
3805
3806
3807 </div>
3808 </div>
3809 <div class="padding"></div>
3810
3811 <div class="entry">
3812 <div class="title">
3813 <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>
3814 </div>
3815 <div class="date">
3816 20th December 2016
3817 </div>
3818 <div class="body">
3819 <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
3820 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
3821 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
3822 going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
3823 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
3824 packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
3825 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will
3826 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
3827 install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to
3828 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
3829
3830 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
3831
3832 <p><pre>
3833 % isenkram-lookup
3834 bluez
3835 cheese
3836 ethtool
3837 fprintd
3838 fprintd-demo
3839 gkrellm-thinkbat
3840 hdapsd
3841 libpam-fprintd
3842 pidgin-blinklight
3843 thinkfan
3844 tlp
3845 tp-smapi-dkms
3846 tp-smapi-source
3847 tpb
3848 %
3849 </pre></p>
3850
3851 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
3852 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
3853 I have all the firmware my machine need:
3854
3855 <p><pre>
3856 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3857 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
3858 %
3859 </pre></p>
3860
3861 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
3862 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates
3863 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
3864 several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to
3865 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
3866 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram. 11 of these
3867 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
3868 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
3869
3870 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The
3871 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
3872 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
3873
3874 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
3875 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
3876 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
3877 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
3878 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
3879 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
3880 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
3881 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
3882 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
3883 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
3884 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
3885 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
3886 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
3887 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
3888 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
3889 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
3890 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
3891 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
3892 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
3893 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
3894 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
3895 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
3896 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
3897 zd1211-firmware</p>
3898
3899 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
3900 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
3901 maintainer to
3902 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
3903 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
3904 for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
3905 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
3906
3907 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
3908 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
3909 card. See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
3910 the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In
3911 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
3912
3913 </div>
3914 <div class="tags">
3915
3916
3917 Tags: <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>.
3918
3919
3920 </div>
3921 </div>
3922 <div class="padding"></div>
3923
3924 <div class="entry">
3925 <div class="title">
3926 <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>
3927 </div>
3928 <div class="date">
3929 11th December 2016
3930 </div>
3931 <div class="body">
3932 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
3933
3934 <p>In my early years, I played
3935 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
3936 Elite</a> on my PC. I spent many months trading and fighting in
3937 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on. The
3938 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
3939 edition I played had a 64 KB executable. I am still impressed today
3940 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
3941 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
3942 small.</p>
3943
3944 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
3945 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
3946 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago. It was
3947 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
3948 still valid. But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
3949 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station. And I am still not
3950 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
3951 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
3952 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
3953
3954 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
3955 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
3956 planets to be able to decide where to trade what. This time I had the
3957 advantages of the
3958 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
3959 where information about each planet is easily available with common
3960 price ranges and suggested trading routes. This improved my ability
3961 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
3962 useful equipent in a few days. I believe I originally played for
3963 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
3964 after less then a week.</p>
3965
3966 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
3967 space, you should try out Oolite. It is available for Linux, MacOSX
3968 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
3969
3970 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3971 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3972 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3973
3974 </div>
3975 <div class="tags">
3976
3977
3978 Tags: <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>.
3979
3980
3981 </div>
3982 </div>
3983 <div class="padding"></div>
3984
3985 <div class="entry">
3986 <div class="title">
3987 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
3988 </div>
3989 <div class="date">
3990 25th November 2016
3991 </div>
3992 <div class="body">
3993 <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
3994 installation system, observing how using
3995 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
3996 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit. My testing measured
3997 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
3998 1000 packages from within the installer. The eatmydata package
3999 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing. This is a bit
4000 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
4001 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
4002 machine crashes at an inconvenient time. But for an installation, if
4003 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
4004 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
4005 up the process make perfect sense.
4006
4007 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
4008 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
4009 but did not have time to push it any further. But a few months ago I
4010 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
4011 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
4012 speedup in Debian. Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
4013 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
4014 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
4015 quicker installations. It can be enabled using preseeding. The
4016 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
4017
4018 <blockquote><pre>
4019 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
4020 </pre></blockquote>
4021
4022 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
4023 environment early in the installation sequence. Having it installed
4024 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
4025 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
4026 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata. This is enough to
4027 speed up the installation process. There is a proposal to
4028 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
4029 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
4030 tested its impact.</p>
4031
4032
4033 </div>
4034 <div class="tags">
4035
4036
4037 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>.
4038
4039
4040 </div>
4041 </div>
4042 <div class="padding"></div>
4043
4044 <div class="entry">
4045 <div class="title">
4046 <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>
4047 </div>
4048 <div class="date">
4049 13th November 2016
4050 </div>
4051 <div class="body">
4052 <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
4053 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
4054 multi-threaded program, finally
4055 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
4056 Debian unstable yesterday</A>. Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
4057 months since
4058 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
4059 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
4060 it suitable for Debian. There are still issues with clang
4061 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
4062 JavaScript libraries.</p>
4063
4064 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
4065
4066 <p><blockquote>
4067 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
4068 </blockquote></p>
4069
4070 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
4071 directory with the profiling information. This is then given to a
4072 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
4073 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
4074 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
4075
4076 <p><blockquote>
4077 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
4078 </blockquote></p>
4079
4080 <p>See the project home page and the
4081 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
4082 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
4083 working.</p>
4084
4085 </div>
4086 <div class="tags">
4087
4088
4089 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4090
4091
4092 </div>
4093 </div>
4094 <div class="padding"></div>
4095
4096 <div class="entry">
4097 <div class="title">
4098 <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>
4099 </div>
4100 <div class="date">
4101 7th November 2016
4102 </div>
4103 <div class="body">
4104 <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
4105 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
4106 encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to
4107 list options only used in a work setting. The background is the
4108 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
4109 a blog post from Sander Venima about
4110 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
4111 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
4112 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
4113 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>). I wanted an
4114 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
4115 in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to
4116 look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text
4117 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
4118 VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to
4119 use, it is also useful to have a look at
4120 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
4121 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
4122 provide valuable information.</p>
4123
4124 <p>So, on to the list. There were some used by many, some used by a
4125 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
4126 claiming to use them. Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
4127 given the biased self selected set of participants. First the ones
4128 used by many:</p>
4129
4130 <ul>
4131
4132 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
4133 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
4134 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
4135 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
4136 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
4137
4138 </ul>
4139
4140 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
4141
4142 <ul>
4143
4144 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
4145 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
4146 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
4147 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
4148 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
4149
4150 </ul>
4151
4152 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
4153
4154 <ul>
4155
4156 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
4157 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
4158 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
4159 <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>
4160 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
4161 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
4162 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
4163 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
4164 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
4165 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
4166
4167 </ul>
4168
4169 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
4170 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
4171 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
4172
4173 <ul>
4174
4175 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
4176 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
4177 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
4178 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
4179
4180 </ul>
4181
4182 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
4183 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
4184 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses. The
4185 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
4186 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
4187 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
4188 your friends and family. We can not expect them to allow the
4189 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
4190 their loved ones.</p>
4191
4192 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR. Most IRC clients do not
4193 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
4194 you wanted to. In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
4195 have a IRC client with OTR. For private communication to really be
4196 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
4197 currently used client. I can not simply ask my family to install an
4198 IRC client. I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
4199 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going. This is
4200 a non-starter for most.</p>
4201
4202 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
4203 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
4204 being forced to share with people I do not know. I do not want to
4205 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
4206 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
4207 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
4208 less invaded.</p>
4209
4210 </div>
4211 <div class="tags">
4212
4213
4214 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>.
4215
4216
4217 </div>
4218 </div>
4219 <div class="padding"></div>
4220
4221 <div class="entry">
4222 <div class="title">
4223 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
4224 </div>
4225 <div class="date">
4226 4th November 2016
4227 </div>
4228 <div class="body">
4229 <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
4230 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
4231 present. It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
4232 build a Segway like balancing lego robot. I had already built
4233 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
4234 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
4235 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well. It
4236 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
4237 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
4238 would fall over after a short while. I wanted something more robust,
4239 and had
4240 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
4241 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
4242 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
4243 loved ones. :)</p>
4244
4245 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
4246 since then. But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
4247 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
4248 building
4249 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
4250 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot. Build instructions and
4251 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
4252 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
4253 together. And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
4254 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
4255 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour. The resulting robot
4256 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
4257
4258 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
4259
4260 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
4261 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
4262 (taskControl). I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
4263 working without that sensor present. Now it balances just fine until
4264 the battery status run low:</p>
4265
4266 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
4267 <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
4268 </video></p>
4269
4270 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
4271 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
4272
4273 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
4274 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
4275 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
4276 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
4277 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team. Personally I own a
4278 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
4279 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
4280 should.</p>
4281
4282 </div>
4283 <div class="tags">
4284
4285
4286 Tags: <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>.
4287
4288
4289 </div>
4290 </div>
4291 <div class="padding"></div>
4292
4293 <div class="entry">
4294 <div class="title">
4295 <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>
4296 </div>
4297 <div class="date">
4298 10th October 2016
4299 </div>
4300 <div class="body">
4301 <p>In July
4302 <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
4303 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
4304 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is
4305 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
4306
4307 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
4308 it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the
4309 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
4310 setup, identity and keys. The reason behind this major mess was
4311 running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have
4312 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
4313 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I
4314 had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling
4315 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
4316 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
4317 problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
4318 protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big
4319 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
4320 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
4321 time.</p>
4322
4323 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
4324 make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still
4325 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
4326 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
4327 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
4328 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
4329 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
4330
4331 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
4332 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated
4333 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The
4334 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
4335 and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more
4336 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
4337 button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run
4338 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
4339 now. I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
4340 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
4341
4342 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
4343
4344 <ol>
4345
4346 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
4347 browser you need. Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
4348 know, so you need to install it.
4349
4350 <pre>
4351 apt install git tor chromium
4352 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4353 </pre></li>
4354
4355 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
4356 block below.</li>
4357
4358 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
4359 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
4360
4361 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
4362 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
4363 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
4364 'Register'. Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
4365 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
4366
4367 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others. Note, new contacts do
4368 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
4369 no way to assign names to Contacts. There is also no way to create or
4370 update chat groups. I suspect this is because the web app do not have
4371 a associated contact database.</li>
4372
4373 </ol>
4374
4375 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
4376 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
4377 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
4378 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon). See for
4379 example
4380 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
4381 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
4382 view on these issues. But the network effect is strong in this case,
4383 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
4384 Signal. Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
4385 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
4386 laptop</a>? It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
4387 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
4388 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
4389 working on Debian Stable.</p>
4390
4391 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
4392 working. It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
4393 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
4394
4395 <pre>
4396 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
4397 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
4398 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
4399 --- a/js/background.js
4400 +++ b/js/background.js
4401 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
4402 });
4403 });
4404
4405 - var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4406 + var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
4407 var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
4408 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4409 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4410 var messageReceiver;
4411 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4412 if (messageReceiver) {
4413 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
4414 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
4415 --- a/js/expire.js
4416 +++ b/js/expire.js
4417 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4418 ;(function() {
4419 'use strict';
4420 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4421 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
4422
4423 window.extension = window.extension || {};
4424
4425 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
4426 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
4427 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
4428 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
4429 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
4430 return {
4431 'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
4432 'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
4433 - 'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
4434 + 'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
4435 + 'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
4436 };
4437 },
4438 clearQR: function() {
4439 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
4440 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
4441 --- a/options.html
4442 +++ b/options.html
4443 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
4444 &lt;div class='nav'>
4445 &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
4446 &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
4447 - &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
4448 + &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
4449 + &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
4450 +
4451 + &lt;/div>
4452 &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
4453 &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
4454 &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
4455 --- /dev/null 2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
4456 +++ b/run-signal-app 2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
4457 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
4458 +#!/bin/sh
4459 +set -e
4460 +cd $(dirname $0)
4461 +mkdir -p userdata
4462 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
4463 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
4464 + (cd $userdata && git init)
4465 +fi
4466 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
4467 +exec chromium \
4468 + --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4469 + --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4470 EOF
4471 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
4472 </pre>
4473
4474 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4475 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4476 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4477
4478 </div>
4479 <div class="tags">
4480
4481
4482 Tags: <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>.
4483
4484
4485 </div>
4486 </div>
4487 <div class="padding"></div>
4488
4489 <div class="entry">
4490 <div class="title">
4491 <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>
4492 </div>
4493 <div class="date">
4494 7th October 2016
4495 </div>
4496 <div class="body">
4497 <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
4498 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
4499 packages support the hardware in a given machine. The command line
4500 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
4501 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
4502 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
4503 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
4504 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
4505 while using the computer. For example, if you plug in a smart card
4506 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
4507 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
4508 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
4509 cheese is currently missing. This already work just fine.</p>
4510
4511 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
4512 package names. When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
4513 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
4514 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
4515 http. This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
4516 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
4517
4518 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings. The modalias
4519 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
4520 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
4521 globbing. It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
4522 identifiers.</p>
4523
4524 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
4525 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
4526 isenkram propose obsolete packages too. But along came AppStream, a
4527 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
4528 software packages. When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
4529 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
4530 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
4531 mapping hardware to packages. This idea was accepted and AppStream is
4532 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
4533 distribution neutral way. I wrote
4534 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
4535 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
4536 December. If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
4537 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
4538
4539 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
4540 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream. The effect is
4541 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
4542 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
4543 it working. The intention is that this should allow the local user to
4544 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
4545 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
4546
4547 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
4548 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
4549 annoying. The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
4550 the USB device for programming the unit. This used to work, but no
4551 longer in Jessie and Stretch. After some investigation and asking
4552 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
4553 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices. The
4554 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
4555 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
4556 plugdev group during login. Michael Biebl told me that this method
4557 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead. This was good
4558 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
4559 directory like LDAP. Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
4560 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
4561 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
4562 setup. Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
4563 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
4564
4565 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'. It can either be
4566 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
4567 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices. As the
4568 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
4569 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages. Here
4570 is one example. For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
4571 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
4572
4573 <p><pre>
4574 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
4575 SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
4576 </pre></p>
4577
4578 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end. I suspect all
4579 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
4580 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
4581 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>). Perhaps a lintian check should be created
4582 to detect this?</p>
4583
4584 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
4585 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
4586 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
4587 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>. If it is, I guess the
4588 indirect method is the preferred way. Michael
4589 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
4590 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
4591 this clearer. For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
4592 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
4593 directly if no such class exist.</p>
4594
4595 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4596 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4597 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4598
4599 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
4600 please join us on our IRC channel
4601 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
4602 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
4603 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday. A mailing
4604 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
4605
4606 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4607 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4608 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4609
4610 </div>
4611 <div class="tags">
4612
4613
4614 Tags: <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>.
4615
4616
4617 </div>
4618 </div>
4619 <div class="padding"></div>
4620
4621 <div class="entry">
4622 <div class="title">
4623 <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>
4624 </div>
4625 <div class="date">
4626 30th August 2016
4627 </div>
4628 <div class="body">
4629 <p>In April we
4630 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
4631 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
4632 how to set up and administrate a Debian system. Today I am happy to
4633 report that the first draft is now publicly available. You can find
4634 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
4635 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages). The first
4636 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
4637 proofreading the content. If you want to help out, please start
4638 contributing using
4639 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
4640 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
4641 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
4642 translators mailing list</a>. Please also check out
4643 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
4644 contributors</a>. A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
4645 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
4646
4647 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
4648 electronic form.</p>
4649
4650 </div>
4651 <div class="tags">
4652
4653
4654 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>.
4655
4656
4657 </div>
4658 </div>
4659 <div class="padding"></div>
4660
4661 <div class="entry">
4662 <div class="title">
4663 <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>
4664 </div>
4665 <div class="date">
4666 11th August 2016
4667 </div>
4668 <div class="body">
4669 <p>This summer, I read a great article
4670 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
4671 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
4672 how to profile multi-threaded programs. It presented a system for
4673 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
4674 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
4675 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run. It does this by
4676 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
4677 and measure how this affect processing time. The processing time is
4678 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
4679 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END). It
4680 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
4681 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
4682
4683 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
4684 get the system into Debian. I
4685 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
4686 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
4687 system ready for Debian by sending patches. The build process need to
4688 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
4689 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
4690 profiling information included in the source package.
4691 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
4692
4693 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple. To run an coz experiment
4694 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
4695
4696 <p><blockquote><pre>
4697 coz run --- program-to-run
4698 </pre></blockquote></p>
4699
4700 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
4701 information. To show what part of the code affect the performance
4702 most, use a web browser and either point it to
4703 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
4704 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch). Check out this web
4705 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
4706 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
4707 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
4708 code, rebuild and run the profiler. This allow coz to do more
4709 targeted experiments.</p>
4710
4711 <p>A video published by ACM
4712 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
4713 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube. There is also a paper
4714 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
4715 titled
4716 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
4717 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
4718
4719 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
4720 for Coz is available from github. It will only build with clang
4721 because it uses a
4722 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
4723 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
4724 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
4725 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
4726
4727 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
4728 of software in Debian. I would very much like some help with the
4729 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
4730 C++ libraries.</p>
4731
4732 </div>
4733 <div class="tags">
4734
4735
4736 Tags: <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>.
4737
4738
4739 </div>
4740 </div>
4741 <div class="padding"></div>
4742
4743 <div class="entry">
4744 <div class="title">
4745 <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>
4746 </div>
4747 <div class="date">
4748 5th August 2016
4749 </div>
4750 <div class="body">
4751 <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
4752 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
4753 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
4754 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less
4755 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
4756 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And
4757 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
4758 too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
4759 Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this
4760 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
4761 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
4762 Commons is needed.</p>
4763
4764 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
4765 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping. Much to
4766 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
4767 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
4768 available in English since it was first published. In total, 24 paper
4769 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
4770
4771 <table border="0">
4772 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
4773 <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>
4774 <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>
4775 <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>
4776 </table>
4777
4778 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
4779 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Most revenue, around $10 per
4780 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
4781 directly by Lulu.com. The other channels give less revenue. The
4782 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
4783 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu. And Lulu.com tells
4784 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42. No idea
4785 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
4786 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not. But it make me
4787 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
4788 as much as I did.</p>
4789
4790 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
4791 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
4792
4793 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
4794 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
4795 touch.</p>
4796
4797 </div>
4798 <div class="tags">
4799
4800
4801 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>.
4802
4803
4804 </div>
4805 </div>
4806 <div class="padding"></div>
4807
4808 <div class="entry">
4809 <div class="title">
4810 <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>
4811 </div>
4812 <div class="date">
4813 1st August 2016
4814 </div>
4815 <div class="body">
4816 <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
4817 16 across an entire country? Or that there is a TV channel
4818 broadcasting talks by or about
4819 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
4820 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
4821 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
4822 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
4823 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
4824 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
4825 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
4826 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics? It works
4827 using only free software (all of it
4828 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
4829 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
4830
4831 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
4832 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
4833 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
4834 running and developing the software for the channel. The channel is
4835 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
4836 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
4837 broadcasting television). Individuals can broadcast too. The time
4838 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis. Because the
4839 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
4840 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
4841 mistakes. And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
4842 the schedule are free. I see this as an opportunity to spread
4843 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
4844 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
4845 technology related video. The end result is a channel I like to
4846 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
4847 presentations.</p>
4848
4849 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
4850 network (RiksTV). It is also available as a multicast stream on
4851 Uninett. And finally, it is available as
4852 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
4853 Frikanalen and NUUG. Check it out. :)</p>
4854
4855 </div>
4856 <div class="tags">
4857
4858
4859 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>.
4860
4861
4862 </div>
4863 </div>
4864 <div class="padding"></div>
4865
4866 <div class="entry">
4867 <div class="title">
4868 <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>
4869 </div>
4870 <div class="date">
4871 7th July 2016
4872 </div>
4873 <div class="body">
4874 <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
4875 to be a slight challenge. Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
4876 again. It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
4877 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
4878 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
4879 device I had access to. It is a old mobile phone with a broken
4880 microphone The initial idea had been to just
4881 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
4882 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
4883 until a few days ago.</p>
4884
4885 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
4886 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
4887 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
4888 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
4889 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
4890 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
4891 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
4892
4893 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
4894 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027. This
4895 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
4896 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
4897 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not. So I had to
4898 come up with a different approach. I got a lot of help from AndyCap
4899 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
4900 him.</p>
4901
4902 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
4903 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
4904 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
4905 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
4906 project named unruu</a> using libunshield. The unshield tool did not
4907 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
4908 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
4909 devices it would work for.</p>
4910
4911 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device. For this I
4912 followed some instructions
4913 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
4914 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
4915 machine with Debian testing:</p>
4916
4917 <p><pre>
4918 adb reboot-bootloader
4919 fastboot oem rebootRUU
4920 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4921 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4922 fastboot reboot
4923 </pre></p>
4924
4925 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
4926 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
4927 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
4928 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
4929 too.</p>
4930
4931 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
4932 instructions on the HTC developer web site. I got the device token
4933 like this:</p>
4934
4935 <p><pre>
4936 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
4937 </pre>
4938
4939 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
4940 this:</p>
4941
4942 <p><pre>
4943 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
4944 </pre></p>
4945
4946 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
4947 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
4948 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
4949 before I start. We will see what happen next. Perhaps I should
4950 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
4951
4952 </div>
4953 <div class="tags">
4954
4955
4956 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>.
4957
4958
4959 </div>
4960 </div>
4961 <div class="padding"></div>
4962
4963 <div class="entry">
4964 <div class="title">
4965 <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>
4966 </div>
4967 <div class="date">
4968 3rd July 2016
4969 </div>
4970 <div class="body">
4971 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
4972 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
4973 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
4974 friends and family are already using it. As I by choice do not own a
4975 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected. And I wanted to
4976 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
4977 machine. But yesterday I managed to get it working. I used the
4978 Github source, compared it to the source in
4979 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
4980 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
4981 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
4982 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form. Here is
4983 the recipe how I did it.</p>
4984
4985 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
4986
4987 <pre>
4988 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4989 </pre>
4990
4991 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
4992 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
4993
4994 <pre>
4995 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
4996 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
4997 --- ./js/background.js 2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4998 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js 2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4999 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
5000 });
5001 });
5002
5003 - var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
5004 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
5005 + var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
5006 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
5007 var messageReceiver;
5008 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
5009 if (messageReceiver) {
5010 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
5011 --- ./js/expire.js 2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
5012 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
5013 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
5014 ;(function() {
5015 'use strict';
5016 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
5017 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
5018
5019 window.extension = window.extension || {};
5020
5021 EOF
5022 </pre>
5023
5024 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
5025 an expiration timestamp. This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
5026 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
5027 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
5028
5029 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
5030 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
5031
5032 <pre>
5033 #!/bin/sh
5034 cd $(dirname $0)
5035 mkdir -p userdata
5036 exec chromium \
5037 --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
5038 --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
5039 </pre>
5040
5041 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
5042 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
5043 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
5044 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
5045 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
5046
5047 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
5048 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
5049 repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
5050 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
5051 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
5052 registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and
5053 pressed 'Call'. 5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
5054 repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number
5055 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
5056 Signal from my laptop.
5057
5058 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
5059 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
5060 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
5061 setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
5062 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
5063 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
5064 So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is
5065 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
5066 to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only
5067 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options
5068 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
5069 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
5070
5071 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
5072 on this topic in
5073 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
5074 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
5075 phone</a>.</p>
5076
5077 </div>
5078 <div class="tags">
5079
5080
5081 Tags: <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>.
5082
5083
5084 </div>
5085 </div>
5086 <div class="padding"></div>
5087
5088 <div class="entry">
5089 <div class="title">
5090 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
5091 </div>
5092 <div class="date">
5093 6th June 2016
5094 </div>
5095 <div class="body">
5096 <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
5097 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
5098 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
5099 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
5100 the various players claimed support for. The range was from 55 to 130
5101 MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all
5102 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
5103 their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types
5104 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
5105
5106 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
5107 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
5108 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
5109 favorite media player VLC. The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
5110 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
5111 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
5112 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
5113
5114 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian? It is VLC, followed by
5115 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
5116 kmplayer. I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
5117 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
5118 toten and parole.</p>
5119
5120 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
5121 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
5122 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
5123 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
5124 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
5125 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo. Personally I find
5126 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
5127 players in Debian. As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
5128 formats.</p>
5129
5130 </div>
5131 <div class="tags">
5132
5133
5134 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>.
5135
5136
5137 </div>
5138 </div>
5139 <div class="padding"></div>
5140
5141 <div class="entry">
5142 <div class="title">
5143 <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>
5144 </div>
5145 <div class="date">
5146 5th June 2016
5147 </div>
5148 <div class="body">
5149 <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
5150 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
5151 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
5152 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
5153 the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
5154 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
5155 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
5156 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
5157 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
5158 present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
5159 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
5160 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
5161 be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
5162 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
5163 shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
5164 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
5165 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
5166 program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we
5167 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
5168 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
5169
5170 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
5171 files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
5172 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
5173 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
5174 browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
5175 such file. I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
5176 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
5177 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
5178 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
5179 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
5180 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
5181 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
5182 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
5183 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
5184
5185 <p>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
5186 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
5187 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
5188 (*.rg). I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
5189 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
5190 included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
5191 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
5192 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
5193
5194 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
5195 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
5196 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
5197 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
5198 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
5199 information is collected from
5200 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
5201 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
5202 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
5203 activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
5204 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
5205 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general
5206 this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
5207 type (preferably
5208 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
5209 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
5210 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
5211 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
5212
5213 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
5214 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
5215 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
5216
5217 <p><blockquote><pre>
5218 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
5219 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
5220 &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
5221 &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
5222 &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
5223 &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
5224 &lt;/mime-type&gt;
5225 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
5226 </pre></blockquote></p>
5227
5228 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
5229 (it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an
5230 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
5231 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
5232
5233 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
5234 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
5235 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
5236
5237 <p><blockquote><pre>
5238 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
5239 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
5240 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
5241 %
5242 </pre></blockquote></p>
5243
5244 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
5245 MimeType= line.</p>
5246
5247 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
5248 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
5249 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
5250 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
5251 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
5252 support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it
5253 fixed. :)</p>
5254
5255 </div>
5256 <div class="tags">
5257
5258
5259 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5260
5261
5262 </div>
5263 </div>
5264 <div class="padding"></div>
5265
5266 <div class="entry">
5267 <div class="title">
5268 <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>
5269 </div>
5270 <div class="date">
5271 28th May 2016
5272 </div>
5273 <div class="body">
5274 <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
5275 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
5276 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
5277 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG). A
5278 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
5279 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
5280 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
5281 currently publishes its talks. You can
5282 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
5283 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
5284 on demand page for the talk
5285 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
5286 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
5287
5288 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
5289 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
5290
5291 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
5292 <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
5293 </video></p>
5294
5295 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
5296 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
5297
5298 </div>
5299 <div class="tags">
5300
5301
5302 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>.
5303
5304
5305 </div>
5306 </div>
5307 <div class="padding"></div>
5308
5309 <div class="entry">
5310 <div class="title">
5311 <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>
5312 </div>
5313 <div class="date">
5314 25th May 2016
5315 </div>
5316 <div class="body">
5317 <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
5318 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
5319 related packages. The idea is to have a database of mappings between
5320 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
5321 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle. Some use cases
5322 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
5323 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
5324 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
5325 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
5326 install the driver for it. The system work well, and even have a few
5327 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
5328 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
5329
5330 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
5331 good documentation and example code on how to use it. But aptdaemon
5332 is going away and is generally being replaced by
5333 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
5334 so Isenkram needed a rewrite. And today, thanks to the great patch
5335 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
5336 rewrite finally took place. I've just uploaded a new version of
5337 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
5338 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit. To check it out,
5339 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
5340 and see if it is recognised.</p>
5341
5342 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
5343 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
5344 program. This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
5345
5346 <p><blockquote><pre>
5347 % isenkram-lookup
5348 bluez
5349 cheese
5350 fprintd
5351 fprintd-demo
5352 gkrellm-thinkbat
5353 hdapsd
5354 libpam-fprintd
5355 pidgin-blinklight
5356 thinkfan
5357 tleds
5358 tp-smapi-dkms
5359 tp-smapi-source
5360 tpb
5361 %p
5362 </pre></blockquote></p>
5363
5364 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places. The preferred way
5365 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
5366 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5367 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
5368 See
5369 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
5370 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
5371
5372 </div>
5373 <div class="tags">
5374
5375
5376 Tags: <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>.
5377
5378
5379 </div>
5380 </div>
5381 <div class="padding"></div>
5382
5383 <div class="entry">
5384 <div class="title">
5385 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
5386 </div>
5387 <div class="date">
5388 23rd May 2016
5389 </div>
5390 <div class="body">
5391 <p>Yesterday I updated the
5392 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
5393 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
5394 enterprising users. There were some nice user and visible changes.
5395 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work. A design flaw in
5396 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
5397 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
5398 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
5399 called from the desktop menu. I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
5400 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
5401 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
5402
5403 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
5404 graphs (the one showing the last few hours). New is also the user of
5405 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red. The percentages
5406 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
5407 capacity.</p>
5408
5409 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
5410
5411 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
5412 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
5413 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time. The red
5414 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
5415
5416 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
5417
5418 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
5419 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
5420 shrinking. :(</p>
5421
5422 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
5423 more hardware models. On some hardware, Linux power supply
5424 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
5425 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/. Now
5426 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
5427 machine.</p>
5428
5429 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5430 check out the
5431 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5432 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5433 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
5434 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5435 Patches are very welcome.</p>
5436
5437 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5438 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5439 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5440
5441 </div>
5442 <div class="tags">
5443
5444
5445 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5446
5447
5448 </div>
5449 </div>
5450 <div class="padding"></div>
5451
5452 <div class="entry">
5453 <div class="title">
5454 <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>
5455 </div>
5456 <div class="date">
5457 21st May 2016
5458 </div>
5459 <div class="body">
5460 <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
5461 2004 book Cultura Libre was published. Today I noticed that the book
5462 is now available from book stores. You can now buy it from
5463 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
5464 ($19.99),
5465 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
5466 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
5467 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
5468 ($19.99). The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project. If
5469 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
5470 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
5471 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
5472 less).</p>
5473
5474 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
5475 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon. Not quite sure how
5476 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
5477 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
5478 the paperback edition, they are
5479 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
5480 from github</a>.</p>
5481
5482 </div>
5483 <div class="tags">
5484
5485
5486 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>.
5487
5488
5489 </div>
5490 </div>
5491 <div class="padding"></div>
5492
5493 <div class="entry">
5494 <div class="title">
5495 <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>
5496 </div>
5497 <div class="date">
5498 19th May 2016
5499 </div>
5500 <div class="body">
5501 <p>I just donated to the
5502 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
5503 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
5504 site popcorn-time.no tested in court. I hope everyone that agree with
5505 me will do the same.</p>
5506
5507 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
5508 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
5509 talking to a judge first? I am. What if the free software system
5510 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
5511 and was called Popcorn Time? Would that affect your view? It still
5512 make me worried.</p>
5513
5514 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
5515 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
5516 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
5517 the courts. I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
5518 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
5519 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
5520 permission first. I was even more surprised when I had a look at
5521 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
5522 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
5523 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
5524 holders permissions.</p>
5525
5526 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
5527 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
5528 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
5529 and
5530 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
5531 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
5532 on
5533 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
5534 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
5535 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
5536 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>. It even got some
5537 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
5538 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
5539
5540 <p>I
5541 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
5542 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
5543 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
5544 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
5545 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
5546 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
5547 legally challenged. They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
5548 those that want to support the request.</p>
5549
5550 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
5551 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
5552 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
5553 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
5554 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
5555
5556 </div>
5557 <div class="tags">
5558
5559
5560 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>.
5561
5562
5563 </div>
5564 </div>
5565 <div class="padding"></div>
5566
5567 <div class="entry">
5568 <div class="title">
5569 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
5570 </div>
5571 <div class="date">
5572 12th May 2016
5573 </div>
5574 <div class="body">
5575 <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
5576 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
5577 Debian. The package status can be seen on
5578 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
5579 for zfs-linux</a>. and
5580 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5581 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
5582 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
5583 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth. It would also be
5584 great if you could help out with
5585 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
5586 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
5587
5588 </div>
5589 <div class="tags">
5590
5591
5592 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5593
5594
5595 </div>
5596 </div>
5597 <div class="padding"></div>
5598
5599 <div class="entry">
5600 <div class="title">
5601 <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>
5602 </div>
5603 <div class="date">
5604 8th May 2016
5605 </div>
5606 <div class="body">
5607 <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
5608 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
5609
5610 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
5611 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
5612 Edu. I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
5613 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
5614 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
5615 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
5616 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
5617 not been updated for a while. But browser plugins are less relevant
5618 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
5619 players.</p>
5620
5621 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
5622 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
5623 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why. The cause is a
5624 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
5625 desktop file</a>. In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
5626 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
5627 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
5628 two for VLC. This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
5629 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
5630 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
5631 support most file formats.</p>
5632
5633 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
5634 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
5635 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
5636 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
5637 listed first in the table.</p>
5638
5639 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian? It is totem, followed by
5640 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
5641 kmplayer. Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
5642 support?</p>
5643
5644 </div>
5645 <div class="tags">
5646
5647
5648 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>.
5649
5650
5651 </div>
5652 </div>
5653 <div class="padding"></div>
5654
5655 <div class="entry">
5656 <div class="title">
5657 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
5658 </div>
5659 <div class="date">
5660 4th May 2016
5661 </div>
5662 <div class="body">
5663 A friend of mine made me aware of
5664 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
5665 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled. I
5666 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
5667
5668 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
5669 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
5670 LCD touch screen. The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
5671 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
5672 confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
5673 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
5674 production started.</p>
5675
5676 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
5677 Debian. Please let me know if you know of any others. Is it the
5678 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
5679
5680 </div>
5681 <div class="tags">
5682
5683
5684 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5685
5686
5687 </div>
5688 </div>
5689 <div class="padding"></div>
5690
5691 <div class="entry">
5692 <div class="title">
5693 <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>
5694 </div>
5695 <div class="date">
5696 18th April 2016
5697 </div>
5698 <div class="body">
5699 <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
5700 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
5701 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
5702 standards and unix-like operating systems. NUUG announced today it
5703 will
5704 <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
5705 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
5706 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
5707 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
5708 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
5709 police. The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
5710 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
5711 a month ago. I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
5712 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
5713 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
5714
5715 </div>
5716 <div class="tags">
5717
5718
5719 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>.
5720
5721
5722 </div>
5723 </div>
5724 <div class="padding"></div>
5725
5726 <div class="entry">
5727 <div class="title">
5728 <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>
5729 </div>
5730 <div class="date">
5731 13th April 2016
5732 </div>
5733 <div class="body">
5734 <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
5735 Schwarz on The Intercept
5736 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
5737 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
5738 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
5739 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
5740 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
5741 I found both truly fascinating. It is amazing what he was able to
5742 find by digging up public sources and government papers. He
5743 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
5744 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
5745 inspiring to read even today.</p>
5746
5747 <p><blockquote>
5748 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
5749 <br>- I. F. Stone
5750 </blockquote></p>
5751
5752 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
5753 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
5754 much as possible. I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
5755 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone. They are definitely in short
5756 supply. If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
5757 check him out.</p>
5758
5759 </div>
5760 <div class="tags">
5761
5762
5763 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>.
5764
5765
5766 </div>
5767 </div>
5768 <div class="padding"></div>
5769
5770 <div class="entry">
5771 <div class="title">
5772 <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>
5773 </div>
5774 <div class="date">
5775 12th April 2016
5776 </div>
5777 <div class="body">
5778 <p>I'm happy to report that
5779 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
5780 French paperback edition</a> of
5781 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
5782 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
5783 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
5784 Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
5785 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
5786 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
5787
5788 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
5789 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
5790 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
5791 available from
5792 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
5793 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
5794 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
5795 coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end
5796 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In
5797 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
5798 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
5799
5800 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
5801 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit. I also had to
5802 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
5803 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
5804 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem. To bypass the problem I
5805 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
5806 that the revenue for these editions go to the
5807 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
5808 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
5809 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
5810 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
5811 and
5812 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
5813 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com. They will get the revenue
5814 for the French edition too. Their revenue is higher if you buy the
5815 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
5816 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
5817
5818 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
5819 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
5820 technical bar to enter is fairly low. Get in touch if you would like
5821 to make this happen.</p>
5822
5823 </div>
5824 <div class="tags">
5825
5826
5827 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>.
5828
5829
5830 </div>
5831 </div>
5832 <div class="padding"></div>
5833
5834 <div class="entry">
5835 <div class="title">
5836 <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>
5837 </div>
5838 <div class="date">
5839 10th April 2016
5840 </div>
5841 <div class="body">
5842 <p>During this weekends
5843 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
5844 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
5845 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
5846 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
5847 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
5848 project</a> to get started. If you want to help out, please start
5849 contributing using
5850 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
5851 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
5852 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
5853 translators mailing list</a>. Please also check out
5854 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
5855 contributors</a>.</p>
5856
5857 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
5858 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
5859 Bokmål too. In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
5860 Mobi versions available. And there are incomplete translations
5861 available for many more languages.</p>
5862
5863 </div>
5864 <div class="tags">
5865
5866
5867 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>.
5868
5869
5870 </div>
5871 </div>
5872 <div class="padding"></div>
5873
5874 <div class="entry">
5875 <div class="title">
5876 <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>
5877 </div>
5878 <div class="date">
5879 7th April 2016
5880 </div>
5881 <div class="body">
5882 <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
5883 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found. I use
5884 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
5885 But I might be wrong.</p>
5886
5887 <p>According to
5888 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
5889 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
5890 0.53% of the population, with the package installed. As far as I know
5891 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
5892 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
5893 installation on Linux in Debian. In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
5894 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
5895 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
5896 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
5897 the population. So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
5898
5899 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
5900 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
5901 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
5902 cleared, the package is still not in Debian. The package is again in
5903 the NEW queue. Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
5904 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
5905 to give up. The current status can be seen on
5906 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5907 team status page</a>, and
5908 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
5909 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
5910
5911 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
5912 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
5913 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
5914 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
5915 to help out the team. This was the background for my blog post about
5916 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
5917 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
5918 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
5919 copyright file. It is not very easy to check every one of the around
5920 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
5921 right. If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
5922 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
5923
5924 </div>
5925 <div class="tags">
5926
5927
5928 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5929
5930
5931 </div>
5932 </div>
5933 <div class="padding"></div>
5934
5935 <div class="entry">
5936 <div class="title">
5937 <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>
5938 </div>
5939 <div class="date">
5940 2nd April 2016
5941 </div>
5942 <div class="body">
5943 <p>Two years ago, I had
5944 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
5945 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
5946 other things noted a still open
5947 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
5948 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
5949 as a trusted timestamping client. A few days ago I was told
5950 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
5951 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
5952 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
5953 using only curl:</p>
5954
5955 <p><pre>
5956 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
5957 | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
5958 --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
5959 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
5960 </pre></p>
5961
5962 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
5963 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
5964 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
5965 was made. The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
5966 in human readable form. The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
5967 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
5968 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
5969
5970 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
5971 the timestamp file, run the following commands. It make sure you have
5972 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
5973 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp. In
5974 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
5975 service certificate.</p>
5976
5977 <p><pre>
5978 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
5979 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
5980 </pre></p>
5981
5982 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
5983 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
5984 Timestamping</a> and
5985 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
5986 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
5987 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
5988 Among the latter is
5989 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
5990 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
5991 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
5992 wikipedia web site. I believe the DIFI service should show up on
5993 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
5994 moment. I hope this will change when it is into production. The
5995 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
5996 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
5997 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
5998 a document was created.</p>
5999
6000 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
6001 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
6002 not been tampered with. This is not a new idea. I found one example
6003 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
6004 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
6005 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
6006
6007 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
6008 searched, so I decided to try to
6009 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
6010 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>. My idea is to
6011 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
6012 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation. This
6013 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
6014 files are tampered with. But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
6015 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
6016 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
6017 reassemble the timestamp file again. To use it, simply run it like
6018 this:
6019
6020 <p><pre>
6021 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
6022 </pre></p>
6023
6024 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
6025 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
6026 logger(1). To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
6027 --verify option:</p>
6028
6029 <p><pre>
6030 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
6031 </pre></p>
6032
6033 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed. The current
6034 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
6035 and this is not a solid assumption. It also uses process number as
6036 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions. I hope to
6037 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
6038 verification later.</p>
6039
6040 <p>Please check out
6041 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
6042 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
6043 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
6044 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
6045 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
6046
6047 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6048 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6049 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6050
6051 </div>
6052 <div class="tags">
6053
6054
6055 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6056
6057
6058 </div>
6059 </div>
6060 <div class="padding"></div>
6061
6062 <div class="entry">
6063 <div class="title">
6064 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
6065 </div>
6066 <div class="date">
6067 23rd March 2016
6068 </div>
6069 <div class="body">
6070 <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
6071 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
6072 later processing and graphing. The original collector store the
6073 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
6074 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
6075 full level, last full level and current battery level. This make it
6076 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
6077 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
6078
6079 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
6080 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable. Get the new battery level graph
6081 and lifetime prediction by running:
6082
6083 <p><pre>
6084 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
6085 </pre></p>
6086
6087 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
6088
6089 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
6090 entry yet):</p>
6091
6092 <p><pre>
6093 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
6094 </pre></p>
6095
6096 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
6097 when there are few data points. The graphs look a bit better with a
6098 few years of data.</p>
6099
6100 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
6101 collector broke in Debian. The scripts in
6102 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed. I
6103 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
6104 know. The issue is reported as
6105 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
6106 pm-utils. I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
6107 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
6108 disconnected. With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
6109 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
6110
6111 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
6112 check out the
6113 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
6114 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
6115 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
6116 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
6117 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
6118
6119 </div>
6120 <div class="tags">
6121
6122
6123 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6124
6125
6126 </div>
6127 </div>
6128 <div class="padding"></div>
6129
6130 <div class="entry">
6131 <div class="title">
6132 <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>
6133 </div>
6134 <div class="date">
6135 19th March 2016
6136 </div>
6137 <div class="body">
6138 <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
6139 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
6140 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
6141 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>. I
6142 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
6143 for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
6144 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
6145 something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
6146 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
6147
6148 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
6149 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
6150 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
6151 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>. Their PDF invoices contain
6152 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
6153 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
6154 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
6155 get a more bogus entry). I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
6156 to read. Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
6157
6158 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
6159 {
6160 "vh":500.00,
6161 "vm":0,
6162 "vl":0,
6163 "uqr":1,
6164 "tp":1,
6165 "nme":"Din Leverandør",
6166 "cc":"NO",
6167 "cid":"997912345 MVA",
6168 "iref":"12300001",
6169 "idt":"20151022",
6170 "ddt":"20151105",
6171 "due":2500.0000,
6172 "cur":"NOK",
6173 "pt":"BBAN",
6174 "acc":"17202612345",
6175 "bc":"BIENNOK1",
6176 "adr":"0313 OSLO"
6177 }
6178 </pre></p>
6179
6180 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
6181 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
6182 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014). The format seem to
6183 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
6184 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
6185 Norway.</p>
6186
6187 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
6188 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
6189 specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
6190 November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
6191 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
6192 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
6193 usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
6194 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
6195 unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
6196 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
6197 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
6198 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
6199 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
6200 with patents, there is always
6201 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
6202 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
6203
6204 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
6205 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
6206 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
6207 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
6208 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
6209 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
6210 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
6211 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
6212 maintain such specification.</p>
6213
6214 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
6215 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
6216 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
6217 similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
6218 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
6219 information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
6220 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
6221 Payment Descriptor</a>. And in Germany, there is a system named
6222 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
6223 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
6224 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
6225 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
6226 provide the payment information. There is also the
6227 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
6228 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
6229 not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
6230 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
6231 format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
6232 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
6233 sets.</p>
6234
6235 </div>
6236 <div class="tags">
6237
6238
6239 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>.
6240
6241
6242 </div>
6243 </div>
6244 <div class="padding"></div>
6245
6246 <div class="entry">
6247 <div class="title">
6248 <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>
6249 </div>
6250 <div class="date">
6251 15th March 2016
6252 </div>
6253 <div class="body">
6254 <p>Back in September, I blogged about
6255 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
6256 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
6257 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I
6258 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
6259 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
6260 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
6261 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
6262 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
6263 fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
6264 hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.</p>
6265
6266 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
6267 hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
6268 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
6269 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
6270 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
6271 information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the
6272 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
6273 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
6274 status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in
6275 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
6276 tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
6277
6278 <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>
6279
6280 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
6281 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
6282 about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
6283 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
6284 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
6285 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
6286
6287 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
6288 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
6289 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
6290 and graphing.</p>
6291
6292 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
6293 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
6294 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
6295 on
6296 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
6297 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
6298
6299 </div>
6300 <div class="tags">
6301
6302
6303 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6304
6305
6306 </div>
6307 </div>
6308 <div class="padding"></div>
6309
6310 <div class="entry">
6311 <div class="title">
6312 <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>
6313 </div>
6314 <div class="date">
6315 19th February 2016
6316 </div>
6317 <div class="body">
6318 <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
6319 details. And one of the details is the content of the
6320 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
6321 the code in the package in question, preferably in
6322 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
6323 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
6324
6325 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
6326 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
6327 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters. So getting it right
6328 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
6329 both you and the ftpmasters some work.. Today, while trying to figure
6330 out what was wrong with
6331 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
6332 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
6333 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
6334 semi-automatically.</p>
6335
6336 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
6337 file based on the code in the source package,
6338 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
6339 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>. I'm
6340 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
6341 create a sensible draft file. As far as I can tell, none of them can
6342 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
6343 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload. I found the debmake
6344 option in
6345 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
6346 blog posts from 2014</a>.
6347
6348 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
6349
6350 <p><pre>
6351 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
6352 </pre></p>
6353
6354 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
6355 this might not be the best option.</p>
6356
6357 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
6358 this approach in
6359 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
6360 blog post from 2015</a>. To generate using cme, use the 'update
6361 dpkg-copyright' option:
6362
6363 <p><pre>
6364 cme update dpkg-copyright
6365 </pre></p>
6366
6367 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright. The cme tool seem to
6368 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
6369
6370 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
6371 check if the file is correct. For this I found two good options,
6372 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>. The former seem
6373 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
6374 ineffective blocks in the copyright file. The latter reports missing
6375 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
6376 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0). I suspect it is good to use both and
6377 fix all issues reported by them before uploading. But I do not know
6378 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
6379 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
6380
6381 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning. It
6382 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
6383 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
6384 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
6385
6386 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
6387 debian/copyright file. Please let me know, or blog about it on
6388 planet.debian.org.</p>
6389
6390 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6391 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6392 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6393
6394 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
6395 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
6396
6397 <p><pre>
6398 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
6399 /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
6400 </pre></p>
6401
6402 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
6403 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
6404 copyright changes in the upstream source. I will try to do the same
6405 with my packages in the future.</p>
6406
6407 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
6408 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
6409 command line.</p>
6410
6411 </div>
6412 <div class="tags">
6413
6414
6415 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6416
6417
6418 </div>
6419 </div>
6420 <div class="padding"></div>
6421
6422 <div class="entry">
6423 <div class="title">
6424 <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>
6425 </div>
6426 <div class="date">
6427 4th February 2016
6428 </div>
6429 <div class="body">
6430 <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
6431 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
6432 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
6433 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it. This can
6434 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
6435 about. :)</p>
6436
6437 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
6438 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
6439 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
6440 unstable. In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
6441 by the kernel during kernel module loading. To find the package
6442 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
6443
6444 <blockquote><pre>
6445 % apt install appstream
6446 [...]
6447 % apt update
6448 [...]
6449 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
6450 awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
6451 firmware-qlogic
6452 %
6453 </pre></blockquote>
6454
6455 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
6456 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
6457 a way appstream can use.</p>
6458
6459 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
6460 given MIME type. This is very useful when you get a file you do not
6461 know how to handle. First find the mime type using <tt>file
6462 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
6463 it. Lets say you got an SVG file. Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
6464 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
6465
6466 <blockquote><pre>
6467 % apt install appstream
6468 [...]
6469 % apt update
6470 [...]
6471 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
6472 awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
6473 bkchem
6474 phototonic
6475 inkscape
6476 shutter
6477 tetzle
6478 geeqie
6479 xia
6480 pinta
6481 gthumb
6482 karbon
6483 comix
6484 mirage
6485 viewnior
6486 postr
6487 ristretto
6488 kolourpaint4
6489 eog
6490 eom
6491 gimagereader
6492 midori
6493 %
6494 </pre></blockquote>
6495
6496 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
6497 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
6498
6499 </div>
6500 <div class="tags">
6501
6502
6503 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6504
6505
6506 </div>
6507 </div>
6508 <div class="padding"></div>
6509
6510 <div class="entry">
6511 <div class="title">
6512 <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>
6513 </div>
6514 <div class="date">
6515 24th January 2016
6516 </div>
6517 <div class="body">
6518 <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
6519 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
6520 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
6521 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
6522 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
6523 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
6524 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
6525 during installation). And when these programs send out information to
6526 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
6527 extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
6528 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
6529 good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
6530 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
6531 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
6532 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
6533 entities.</p>
6534
6535 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
6536
6537 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
6538 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
6539 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
6540 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
6541 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
6542 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
6543 tool to do so is called
6544 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>. I
6545 discovered it when I read
6546 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
6547 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
6548 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
6549 The python program was in Debian, but
6550 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
6551 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
6552 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
6553 have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
6554 get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
6555 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
6556 are now included
6557 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
6558
6559 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
6560 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
6561 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
6562 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
6563 these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
6564 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
6565 days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
6566 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
6567 information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
6568 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
6569 about yourself with the services.</p>
6570
6571 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
6572 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
6573 of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
6574 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
6575 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
6576 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
6577 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
6578 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
6579 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
6580 things. A similar technique have been
6581 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
6582 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
6583 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
6584 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
6585 public.</p>
6586
6587 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
6588 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
6589 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
6590 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
6591
6592 <p>(I have uploaded
6593 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
6594 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
6595 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
6596
6597 </div>
6598 <div class="tags">
6599
6600
6601 Tags: <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>.
6602
6603
6604 </div>
6605 </div>
6606 <div class="padding"></div>
6607
6608 <div class="entry">
6609 <div class="title">
6610 <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>
6611 </div>
6612 <div class="date">
6613 15th January 2016
6614 </div>
6615 <div class="body">
6616 <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
6617 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
6618 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
6619 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
6620 security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always
6621 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
6622 listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard
6623 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
6624 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
6625 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
6626 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
6627 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>. He
6628 was not the first to propose this, as the
6629 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
6630 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
6631 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
6632 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
6633
6634 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
6635 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
6636 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
6637 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
6638 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
6639
6640 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
6641 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
6642 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
6643 of the official Debian mirror site. I recommend installing
6644 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
6645 done in /etc/.</p>
6646
6647 <blockquote><pre>
6648 apt install apt-transport-tor
6649 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
6650 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
6651 </pre></blockquote>
6652
6653 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
6654 the sed commands for these too. The sed command is assuming your are
6655 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror. Adjust the command (or just
6656 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
6657
6658 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later. Note that tools like
6659 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
6660 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs. For
6661 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
6662 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable. So if you
6663 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
6664
6665 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
6666 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
6667 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
6668 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine. Using Tor will
6669 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
6670
6671 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
6672 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
6673 enabled. It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
6674 system.</p>
6675
6676 </div>
6677 <div class="tags">
6678
6679
6680 Tags: <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>.
6681
6682
6683 </div>
6684 </div>
6685 <div class="padding"></div>
6686
6687 <div class="entry">
6688 <div class="title">
6689 <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>
6690 </div>
6691 <div class="date">
6692 23rd December 2015
6693 </div>
6694 <div class="body">
6695 <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
6696 call the car license plate numbers in those days. I would write the
6697 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
6698 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
6699 exotic or special region codes and numbers. It was a fun game to pass
6700 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
6701
6702 <p>A few days I came across
6703 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
6704 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
6705 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
6706 "car numbers" in a machine readable format. I've been looking for
6707 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
6708 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
6709 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
6710 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
6711 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I
6712 discovered the developer
6713 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
6714 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
6715 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
6716 archive.</p>
6717
6718 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
6719 it into Debian, where it currently
6720 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
6721 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
6722
6723 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
6724 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
6725 surveillance system? Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
6726 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
6727 when number plates on my watch list are discovered. Another use case
6728 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
6729 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
6730 car. When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
6731 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
6732 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway. I
6733 guess for such use case it make sense. I am sure there are other use
6734 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
6735
6736 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
6737 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
6738 before running "debuild" to build the source. Or wait a bit until the
6739 package show up in unstable.</p>
6740
6741 </div>
6742 <div class="tags">
6743
6744
6745 Tags: <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>.
6746
6747
6748 </div>
6749 </div>
6750 <div class="padding"></div>
6751
6752 <div class="entry">
6753 <div class="title">
6754 <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>
6755 </div>
6756 <div class="date">
6757 20th December 2015
6758 </div>
6759 <div class="body">
6760 <p>Around three years ago, I created
6761 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
6762 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
6763 hardware related packages. A GUI system in the isenkram package will
6764 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
6765 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine. The same
6766 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
6767 tools in the isenkram-cli package. In addition to mapping hardware,
6768 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
6769 install needed firmware packages automatically. The key for this
6770 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
6771 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
6772 with.</p>
6773
6774 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
6775 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
6776 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
6777 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
6778 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
6779 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
6780 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
6781 appstream system</a> was announced. I got in touch and suggested to
6782 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
6783 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
6784 Debian version of appstream.</p>
6785
6786 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
6787 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
6788 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages. The only
6789 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
6790 pymissile package. I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
6791 how do add the required
6792 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
6793 in pymissile</a>. I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
6794 this content:</p>
6795
6796 <blockquote><pre>
6797 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
6798 &lt;component&gt;
6799 &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
6800 &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
6801 &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
6802 &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
6803 &lt;description&gt;
6804 &lt;p&gt;
6805 Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
6806 Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
6807 motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
6808 launcher.
6809 &lt;/p&gt;
6810 &lt;/description&gt;
6811 &lt;provides&gt;
6812 &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
6813 &lt;/provides&gt;
6814 &lt;/component&gt;
6815 </pre></blockquote>
6816
6817 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
6818 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
6819 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel. In this case, it
6820 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
6821 0202.</p>
6822
6823 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
6824 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
6825 appstream files. Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
6826 these files. A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
6827 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
6828 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use). But
6829 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
6830 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
6831
6832 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
6833 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
6834 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
6835 package under /usr/share/appdata/. I did this by adding the following
6836 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
6837
6838 <blockquote><pre>
6839 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
6840 </pre></blockquote>
6841
6842 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
6843 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
6844 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
6845 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
6846 question.</p>
6847
6848 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
6849 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
6850
6851 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
6852 try running this command on the command line:</p>
6853
6854 <blockquote><pre>
6855 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
6856 </pre></blockquote>
6857
6858 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6859 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6860 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6861
6862 </div>
6863 <div class="tags">
6864
6865
6866 Tags: <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>.
6867
6868
6869 </div>
6870 </div>
6871 <div class="padding"></div>
6872
6873 <div class="entry">
6874 <div class="title">
6875 <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>
6876 </div>
6877 <div class="date">
6878 30th November 2015
6879 </div>
6880 <div class="body">
6881 <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
6882 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
6883 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
6884 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
6885 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
6886
6887 <blockquote>
6888
6889 <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>
6890
6891 <blockquote>
6892 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
6893
6894 The first step is to choose a
6895 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
6896 code.<br/>
6897
6898 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
6899 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
6900
6901 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
6902 work<br/>
6903
6904 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
6905 </blockquote>
6906
6907 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
6908 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
6909 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
6910 0x57</a></small></p>
6911
6912 <p>As the Debian Website
6913 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
6914 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
6915 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
6916 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
6917 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
6918 software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
6919 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
6920 such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free
6921 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
6922 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
6923 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen
6924 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
6925 Freedom">FaiF</a>
6926 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
6927 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
6928 to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal
6929 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With
6930 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
6931 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
6932 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
6933 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
6934 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
6935 In March the SFC supported a
6936 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
6937 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
6938 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
6939 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
6940 kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
6941 conferences
6942 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
6943 or cancelled their talks</a>. As a result they have decided to rely
6944 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
6945 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has
6946 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
6947 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
6948 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
6949 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
6950 Software.</p>
6951
6952 <p>If you support Free Software,
6953 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
6954 what the SFC do, agree with their
6955 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
6956 principles</a>, are happy about their
6957 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
6958 work on a project that is an SFC
6959 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
6960 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
6961 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
6962 Allan Webber</a>,
6963 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
6964 Smith</a>,
6965 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
6966 Bacon</a>, myself and
6967 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
6968 becoming a
6969 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>. For the
6970 next week your donation will be
6971 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
6972 by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to
6973 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to
6974 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
6975 social media accounts.</p>
6976
6977 </blockquote>
6978
6979 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
6980 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a
6981 supporter too?</p>
6982
6983 </div>
6984 <div class="tags">
6985
6986
6987 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>.
6988
6989
6990 </div>
6991 </div>
6992 <div class="padding"></div>
6993
6994 <div class="entry">
6995 <div class="title">
6996 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
6997 </div>
6998 <div class="date">
6999 17th November 2015
7000 </div>
7001 <div class="body">
7002 <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
7003 set it up properly. I wanted to generate it offline and have it
7004 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
7005 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
7006 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever. But
7007 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
7008 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key. See
7009 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
7010 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
7011 the details. This is my new key:</p>
7012
7013 <pre>
7014 pub 3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
7015 Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1 D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
7016 uid Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
7017 uid Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
7018 sub 4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
7019 sub 4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
7020 sub 4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
7021 </pre>
7022
7023 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
7024 my old key.</p>
7025
7026 <p>If you signed my old key
7027 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
7028 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
7029 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
7030 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
7031
7032 </div>
7033 <div class="tags">
7034
7035
7036 Tags: <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>.
7037
7038
7039 </div>
7040 </div>
7041 <div class="padding"></div>
7042
7043 <div class="entry">
7044 <div class="title">
7045 <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>
7046 </div>
7047 <div class="date">
7048 3rd November 2015
7049 </div>
7050 <div class="body">
7051 <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
7052 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
7053 Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
7054 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
7055 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
7056 journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
7057 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
7058 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
7059 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
7060 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
7061 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
7062 journal entries .</p>
7063
7064 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
7065 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
7066 piqued my interest. The title of the document was
7067 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
7068 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
7069 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet"). The
7070 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
7071 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a
7072 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
7073 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-1620">offentleglova § 20,
7074 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
7075 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
7076 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
7077 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
7078 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
7079 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
7080 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
7081 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
7082 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
7083 ended,
7084 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
7085 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
7086 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
7087 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
7088 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
7089 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
7090 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
7091 Transport and Communications</a>. This might be the reason the letter
7092 was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
7093 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
7094 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
7095 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
7096 Geneva.</p>
7097
7098 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
7099 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
7100 over now. This time
7101 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
7102 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
7103 receiver</a> and
7104 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
7105 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
7106 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
7107 public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
7108 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
7109 different clause
7110 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-1620">offentleglova § 20
7111 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
7112 content of the document from the public because it contained
7113 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
7114 that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
7115 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
7116 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
7117 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
7118 of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
7119 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
7120 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
7121 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
7122 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
7123 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
7124
7125 <p>Armed with this
7126 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
7127 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
7128 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
7129 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
7130 the document. According to
7131 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
7132 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
7133 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
7134 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
7135 the report initially and
7136 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
7137 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
7138 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
7139 when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
7140 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
7141 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
7142 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
7143 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
7144 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
7145 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
7146 same person as the author of the document.</p>
7147
7148 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
7149 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
7150 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
7151 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
7152 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
7153 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
7154 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
7155 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
7156
7157 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
7158 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?</p>
7159
7160 </div>
7161 <div class="tags">
7162
7163
7164 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>.
7165
7166
7167 </div>
7168 </div>
7169 <div class="padding"></div>
7170
7171 <div class="entry">
7172 <div class="title">
7173 <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>
7174 </div>
7175 <div class="date">
7176 31st October 2015
7177 </div>
7178 <div class="body">
7179 <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
7180 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
7181 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>. It was
7182 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
7183 and MOBI format. I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
7184 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
7185 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later. This will double the price and force
7186 me to make a profit from selling the book. Anyway, here are links to
7187 get the book in different formats:</p>
7188
7189 <ul>
7190
7191 <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
7192 paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
7193
7194 <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
7195 PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
7196
7197 <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
7198 ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
7199
7200 <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
7201 MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
7202
7203 </ul>
7204
7205 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
7206 at least with the viewers I have been able to test. And the ePub file
7207 have several problems according to
7208 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
7209 to display fine in the viewers I have tested. All the files needed to
7210 create the book in various forms are available from
7211 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
7212 github project page</a>.</p>
7213
7214 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
7215 digi.no. Check out the article
7216 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
7217 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
7218
7219 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
7220 about the project</a> as it moved along. The blogs document the translation
7221 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
7222
7223 </div>
7224 <div class="tags">
7225
7226
7227 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>.
7228
7229
7230 </div>
7231 </div>
7232 <div class="padding"></div>
7233
7234 <div class="entry">
7235 <div class="title">
7236 <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>
7237 </div>
7238 <div class="date">
7239 23rd October 2015
7240 </div>
7241 <div class="body">
7242 <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
7243 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
7244
7245 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
7246 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
7247 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
7248 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
7249 regulation and suggest some solutions. I read the book back then and
7250 was very moved by it. Reading the book inspired me and changed the
7251 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
7252 would read it too.</p>
7253
7254 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
7255 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
7256 that prefer to read books in Norwegian. I translated the book using
7257 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
7258 new edition of the English original. I've been in touch with the
7259 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
7260 published an English version. So I decided to do so. Today, I made
7261 this edition
7262 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
7263 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book. This
7264 is the cover:
7265
7266 <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>
7267
7268 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
7269 few days. I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
7270 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
7271 join the translation project. So far there is only one active
7272 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
7273 need some proof reading.</p>
7274
7275 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
7276 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
7277 github project page</a>. Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
7278 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
7279 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
7280 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
7281 and
7282 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
7283 but I have not taken the time to investigate. I recommend the PDF and
7284 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
7285 have available.</p>
7286
7287 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
7288 to secure some sponsoring from
7289 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
7290 print the book. This is the reason their logo is located on the back
7291 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
7292 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
7293 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
7294
7295 </div>
7296 <div class="tags">
7297
7298
7299 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>.
7300
7301
7302 </div>
7303 </div>
7304 <div class="padding"></div>
7305
7306 <div class="entry">
7307 <div class="title">
7308 <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>
7309 </div>
7310 <div class="date">
7311 19th October 2015
7312 </div>
7313 <div class="body">
7314 <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
7315 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden. The
7316 one hour interview was
7317 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
7318 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
7319 place 2014-10-20.</p>
7320
7321 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
7322 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
7323 being raised. Please check it out.</p>
7324
7325 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
7326
7327 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
7328 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
7329 luck. It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
7330 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
7331 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
7332 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
7333 concerns internally and using official channels. It make me sad
7334 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
7335
7336 </div>
7337 <div class="tags">
7338
7339
7340 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>.
7341
7342
7343 </div>
7344 </div>
7345 <div class="padding"></div>
7346
7347 <div class="entry">
7348 <div class="title">
7349 <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>
7350 </div>
7351 <div class="date">
7352 8th October 2015
7353 </div>
7354 <div class="body">
7355 <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
7356 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
7357 and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has
7358 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
7359 was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good
7360 in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
7361 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
7362 improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in
7363 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
7364 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
7365 downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all
7366 weep.</p>
7367
7368 <p>The movie is also available on
7369 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>. I
7370 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
7371 my parents.</p>
7372
7373 </div>
7374 <div class="tags">
7375
7376
7377 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>.
7378
7379
7380 </div>
7381 </div>
7382 <div class="padding"></div>
7383
7384 <div class="entry">
7385 <div class="title">
7386 <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>
7387 </div>
7388 <div class="date">
7389 1st October 2015
7390 </div>
7391 <div class="body">
7392 <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
7393 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
7394 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
7395 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
7396 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
7397 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
7398 to try to create a French version of the book. He started with the
7399 French translation available from the
7400 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
7401 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
7402 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
7403 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition. We meet
7404 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
7405 channel</a> to discuss the work. If you want to help create a French
7406 edition, check out
7407 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
7408 repository</a> and join us on IRC. If the French edition look good,
7409 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com. A French version of
7410 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
7411
7412 </div>
7413 <div class="tags">
7414
7415
7416 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>.
7417
7418
7419 </div>
7420 </div>
7421 <div class="padding"></div>
7422
7423 <div class="entry">
7424 <div class="title">
7425 <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>
7426 </div>
7427 <div class="date">
7428 24th September 2015
7429 </div>
7430 <div class="body">
7431 <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
7432 But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
7433 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
7434 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
7435 all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
7436 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
7437 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
7438
7439 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
7440
7441 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
7442 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
7443 by someone else. I found
7444 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
7445 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
7446 broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
7447 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
7448 from him. Via
7449 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
7450 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
7451 discovered
7452 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
7453 available in Debian.</p>
7454
7455 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
7456 battery stats ever since. Now my
7457 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
7458 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
7459 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity. My
7460 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
7461
7462 <pre>
7463 #!/bin/sh
7464 # Inspired by
7465 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
7466 # See also
7467 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
7468 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
7469
7470 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
7471 energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
7472
7473 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
7474 (
7475 printf "timestamp,"
7476 for f in $files; do
7477 printf "%s," $f
7478 done
7479 echo
7480 ) > "$logfile"
7481 fi
7482
7483 log_battery() {
7484 # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
7485 # when several log processes run in parallel.
7486 msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
7487 for f in $files; do \
7488 printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
7489 done)
7490 echo "$msg"
7491 }
7492
7493 cd /sys/class/power_supply
7494
7495 for bat in BAT*; do
7496 (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
7497 done
7498 </pre>
7499
7500 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
7501 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
7502 and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
7503 every 10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
7504 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
7505 The code for the Debian package
7506 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
7507 available on github</a>.</p>
7508
7509 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
7510
7511 <pre>
7512 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
7513 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
7514 [...]
7515 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
7516 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
7517 </pre>
7518
7519 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
7520 over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
7521 battery.</p>
7522
7523 <p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
7524 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
7525 satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
7526 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
7527 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
7528 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
7529 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
7530 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
7531 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
7532 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
7533 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
7534 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
7535 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
7536 Linux too.</p>
7537
7538 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
7539 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
7540 preparation for a longer trip? I found
7541 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
7542 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
7543 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
7544 load).</p>
7545
7546 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
7547 at the start. I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
7548 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
7549 back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
7550 speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
7551 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
7552 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
7553 those.</p>
7554
7555 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
7556 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
7557 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
7558 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
7559 and stop. I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
7560 and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
7561 specific.</p>
7562
7563 </div>
7564 <div class="tags">
7565
7566
7567 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7568
7569
7570 </div>
7571 </div>
7572 <div class="padding"></div>
7573
7574 <div class="entry">
7575 <div class="title">
7576 <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>
7577 </div>
7578 <div class="date">
7579 3rd September 2015
7580 </div>
7581 <div class="body">
7582 <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
7583 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
7584 the
7585 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
7586 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
7587 vector format for high resolution printing. But my inkscape knowledge
7588 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
7589
7590 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
7591 the cover yesterday evening. I asked on the
7592 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
7593 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
7594 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
7595 version. Not only did he create a
7596 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
7597 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
7598 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
7599 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>. But the instruction video is
7600 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
7601 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
7602 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
7603 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
7604 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
7605 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
7606
7607 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
7608 on the cover I was drawing. I am happy with the end result, and the
7609 current english version look like this:</p>
7610
7611 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
7612
7613 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
7614 do. I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
7615 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers. The
7616 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
7617 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
7618
7619 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
7620 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
7621 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
7622 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
7623 English or Norwegian Bokmål. I'm waiting to give the the productive
7624 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
7625
7626 </div>
7627 <div class="tags">
7628
7629
7630 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>.
7631
7632
7633 </div>
7634 </div>
7635 <div class="padding"></div>
7636
7637 <div class="entry">
7638 <div class="title">
7639 <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>
7640 </div>
7641 <div class="date">
7642 19th August 2015
7643 </div>
7644 <div class="body">
7645 <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
7646 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
7647 years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior
7648 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
7649 irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version
7650 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
7651 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
7652 pocket book version would look like. After receiving the 500 page
7653 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
7654 small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several
7655 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
7656 small page sizes. I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
7657 instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
7658 URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
7659 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to
7660 change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a
7661 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
7662
7663 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
7664 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
7665 readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists
7666 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
7667 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
7668 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
7669
7670 </div>
7671 <div class="tags">
7672
7673
7674 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>.
7675
7676
7677 </div>
7678 </div>
7679 <div class="padding"></div>
7680
7681 <div class="entry">
7682 <div class="title">
7683 <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>
7684 </div>
7685 <div class="date">
7686 9th August 2015
7687 </div>
7688 <div class="body">
7689 <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is
7690 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
7691 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
7692 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
7693 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
7694 Lessig. I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
7695 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
7696 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
7697 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
7698
7699 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
7700 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
7701 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a
7702 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
7703 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
7704
7705 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
7706 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
7707 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
7708 to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a
7709 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please
7710 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
7711
7712 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for
7713 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
7714 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
7715 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
7716 smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was
7717 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
7718 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
7719 bring the prize down further.</p>
7720
7721 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My
7722 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
7723 cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about
7724 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
7725 description on web based book stores). I would love help with this,
7726 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
7727 the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up
7728 to the task.</p>
7729
7730 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
7731 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current
7732 status can as usual be found on
7733 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
7734 in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the
7735 PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the
7736 dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I
7737 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
7738 formatting.</p>
7739
7740 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
7741 discover translations that should be improved. The final proof
7742 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
7743 result in a few months.</p>
7744
7745 </div>
7746 <div class="tags">
7747
7748
7749 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>.
7750
7751
7752 </div>
7753 </div>
7754 <div class="padding"></div>
7755
7756 <div class="entry">
7757 <div class="title">
7758 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
7759 </div>
7760 <div class="date">
7761 16th July 2015
7762 </div>
7763 <div class="body">
7764 <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
7765 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
7766 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
7767 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
7768 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
7769 chapter. Based on the
7770 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
7771 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
7772 would like to share with you. The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
7773 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
7774 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
7775 file variable. So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
7776 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
7777 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
7778
7779 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
7780 and add this text there:</p>
7781
7782 <pre>
7783 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
7784 </pre>
7785
7786 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
7787 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
7788 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
7789
7790 <pre>
7791 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7792 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7793 &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
7794 &lt;xsl:text&gt;
7795 \usepackage{endnotes}
7796 \let\footnote=\endnote
7797 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
7798 \begin{document}
7799 &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
7800 &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
7801 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7802 </pre>
7803
7804 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
7805 this:</p>
7806
7807 <pre>
7808 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
7809 </pre>
7810
7811 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
7812 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
7813 book project</a> is located.</p>
7814
7815 </div>
7816 <div class="tags">
7817
7818
7819 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>.
7820
7821
7822 </div>
7823 </div>
7824 <div class="padding"></div>
7825
7826 <div class="entry">
7827 <div class="title">
7828 <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>
7829 </div>
7830 <div class="date">
7831 7th July 2015
7832 </div>
7833 <div class="body">
7834 <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
7835 <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
7836 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
7837 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA
7838 if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it
7839 does not.</p>
7840
7841 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
7842 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
7843 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
7844 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
7845
7846 <p><blockquote>
7847
7848 <p>According to
7849 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
7850 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
7851 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
7852 Video". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
7853 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me. What
7854 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
7855
7856 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
7857 PDF named
7858 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
7859 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
7860 fees:</p>
7861
7862 <ul>
7863 <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
7864 <ul>
7865 <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
7866 subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
7867 $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
7868 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
7869
7870 <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
7871 length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
7872 </ul></li>
7873
7874 <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
7875 <ul>
7876 <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
7877 (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
7878 maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
7879
7880 <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
7881 – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
7882 </ul></li>
7883 </ul>
7884
7885 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
7886 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
7887 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
7888 one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source
7889 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
7890 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
7891
7892 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
7893 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
7894 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
7895 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
7896 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
7897 Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
7898 access to personalized services?</p>
7899
7900 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
7901 Internet.</p>
7902 </blockquote></p>
7903
7904 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
7905 with the MPEG LA:</p>
7906
7907 <p><blockquote>
7908 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We
7909 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
7910
7911 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
7912 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
7913 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10). Specifically, coverage is
7914 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
7915 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
7916 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
7917 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
7918
7919 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
7920 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
7921 the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service
7922 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
7923 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
7924 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
7925 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
7926 License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
7927 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
7928 AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given
7929 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
7930 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
7931
7932 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
7933 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
7934 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC
7935 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
7936 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers
7937 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
7938 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
7939
7940 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
7941 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
7942 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
7943 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
7944
7945 <p>For your reference, I have attached
7946 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
7947 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
7948 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
7949 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
7950 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
7951 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
7952 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License. Please note that the
7953 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
7954 be used for execution.</p>
7955
7956 <p>I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional
7957 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
7958 free to contact me directly.</p>
7959 </blockquote></p>
7960
7961 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
7962 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
7963 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
7964 But I still had a few questions:</p>
7965
7966 <p><blockquote>
7967 <p>I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get
7968 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The
7969 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
7970 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses
7971 typically look similar to this:
7972
7973 <p><blockquote>
7974 This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
7975 the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
7976 video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
7977 decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
7978 personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
7979 obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
7980 license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
7981 information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
7982 </blockquote></p>
7983
7984 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
7985 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
7986 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will
7987 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is
7988 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
7989 </blockquote></p>
7990
7991 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
7992 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
7993
7994 <p><blockquote>
7995
7996 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
7997 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
7998 reads:</p>
7999
8000 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
8001 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
8002 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
8003 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
8004 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
8005 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
8006 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
8007 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
8008
8009 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
8010 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
8011 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
8012 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
8013 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
8014 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
8015 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
8016 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
8017
8018 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
8019 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
8020 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
8021 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
8022 payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a
8023 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
8024 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
8025 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
8026 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
8027
8028 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
8029 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
8030 Norway.</p>
8031
8032 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further
8033 assistance, just let me know.</p>
8034 </blockquote></p>
8035
8036 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
8037 asked for more information:</p>
8038
8039 <p><blockquote>
8040
8041 <p>But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly,
8042 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
8043 Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the
8044 list available from &lt;URL:
8045 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
8046 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
8047 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
8048 Electric Corporation expired in 2012. Which patents are you referring
8049 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
8050
8051 </blockquote></p>
8052
8053 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
8054 in that list:</p>
8055
8056 <p><blockquote>
8057
8058 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
8059 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012. Therefore, where AVC
8060 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
8061 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
8062 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
8063 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
8064 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify
8065 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
8066 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
8067
8068 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
8069 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
8070 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
8071 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
8072 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
8073 Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to
8074 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
8075 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
8076 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
8077 Portfolio Patents.</p>
8078 </blockquote></p>
8079
8080 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
8081 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
8082 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
8083 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
8084 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
8085 content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
8086 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the
8087 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
8088 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
8089
8090 </div>
8091 <div class="tags">
8092
8093
8094 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>.
8095
8096
8097 </div>
8098 </div>
8099 <div class="padding"></div>
8100
8101 <div class="entry">
8102 <div class="title">
8103 <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>
8104 </div>
8105 <div class="date">
8106 5th July 2015
8107 </div>
8108 <div class="body">
8109 <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
8110 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback. I wish to
8111 thank every one of these. Several pointed me to the possibility of
8112 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
8113 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
8114 machine. But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
8115 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
8116 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement. If I did
8117 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
8118 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
8119 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
8120
8121 <p>One tip I got was to use the
8122 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
8123 compare laptop models. It seem to have more models available than
8124 prisjakt.no. Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
8125 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
8126 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
8127 keyboards I tested. Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
8128
8129 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
8130 newest Thinkpad X model. The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
8131 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
8132 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
8133 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>. The reports I
8134 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent. Some say the keyboard
8135 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
8136 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
8137 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
8138 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
8139 replace it. I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
8140 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230. I'm
8141 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
8142 noisy. In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
8143 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
8144
8145 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
8146 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
8147 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
8148 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
8149
8150 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback. It help a lot
8151 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
8152
8153 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
8154 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops. They got several
8155 different
8156 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
8157 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
8158
8159 </div>
8160 <div class="tags">
8161
8162
8163 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8164
8165
8166 </div>
8167 </div>
8168 <div class="padding"></div>
8169
8170 <div class="entry">
8171 <div class="title">
8172 <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>
8173 </div>
8174 <div class="date">
8175 3rd July 2015
8176 </div>
8177 <div class="body">
8178 <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
8179 replacement soon. The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
8180 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
8181 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
8182 flickering.</p>
8183
8184 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
8185 still as
8186 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
8187 described them in 2013</a>. The last time I bought a laptop, I had
8188 good help from
8189 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
8190 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
8191 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually. Three button mouse
8192 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
8193 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
8194 G2) lack three mouse buttons). It is also unclear to me how good the
8195 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are. I hope Lenovo have not messed up
8196 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
8197 deteriorated since X41.</p>
8198
8199 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
8200 seem sensible to me? Are there better services around to search the
8201 set of available laptops for features? Please send me an email if you
8202 have suggestions.</p>
8203
8204 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
8205 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
8206 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
8207
8208 </div>
8209 <div class="tags">
8210
8211
8212 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8213
8214
8215 </div>
8216 </div>
8217 <div class="padding"></div>
8218
8219 <div class="entry">
8220 <div class="title">
8221 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
8222 </div>
8223 <div class="date">
8224 2nd July 2015
8225 </div>
8226 <div class="body">
8227 <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
8228 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
8229 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
8230 the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the
8231 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
8232 finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because
8233 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
8234 talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
8235 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
8236 from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are
8237 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
8238 Youtube too</a>.</p>
8239
8240 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the
8241 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
8242 pages</a> to view them.</p>
8243
8244 <ul>
8245
8246 <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
8247 to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
8248
8249 <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
8250
8251 <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
8252 (Olav Helland)</li>
8253
8254 <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
8255 Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
8256
8257 <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
8258
8259 <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
8260
8261 <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
8262 Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
8263
8264 <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
8265
8266 <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
8267
8268 <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
8269
8270 <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
8271
8272 <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
8273 Sevens)</li>
8274
8275 <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
8276 (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
8277
8278 <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
8279 Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
8280
8281 <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
8282 Dyvik)</li>
8283
8284 <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
8285
8286 </ul>
8287
8288 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
8289 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
8290 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
8291 argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
8292 which sent me on a detour to
8293 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
8294 bs1770gain for Debian</a>. Now this is in place and it became a lot
8295 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
8296
8297 </div>
8298 <div class="tags">
8299
8300
8301 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>.
8302
8303
8304 </div>
8305 </div>
8306 <div class="padding"></div>
8307
8308 <div class="entry">
8309 <div class="title">
8310 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
8311 </div>
8312 <div class="date">
8313 15th June 2015
8314 </div>
8315 <div class="body">
8316 <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
8317 in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to
8318 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
8319 ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in
8320 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
8321 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source
8322 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
8323 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
8324 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
8325
8326 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
8327 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number. I'm
8328 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
8329 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
8330
8331 <pre>
8332 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
8333
8334 real 0m2.841s
8335 user 0m0.184s
8336 sys 0m0.036s
8337 %
8338 </pre>
8339
8340 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
8341 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The
8342 resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges
8343 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
8344 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
8345
8346 <pre>
8347 digraph ownership {
8348 rankdir = LR;
8349 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
8350 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
8351 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
8352 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
8353 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
8354 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
8355 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
8356 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
8357 }
8358 </pre>
8359
8360 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
8361 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
8362 dagbladet.png</tt>". The result can be seen below:</p>
8363
8364 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
8365
8366 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
8367 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
8368 registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership
8369 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
8370 of the ownership links.</p>
8371
8372 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
8373 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
8374
8375 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
8376 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
8377 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
8378 have a Norwegian organisation number. I've also been told that there
8379 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
8380 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
8381 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
8382
8383 </div>
8384 <div class="tags">
8385
8386
8387 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>.
8388
8389
8390 </div>
8391 </div>
8392 <div class="padding"></div>
8393
8394 <div class="entry">
8395 <div class="title">
8396 <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>
8397 </div>
8398 <div class="date">
8399 11th June 2015
8400 </div>
8401 <div class="body">
8402 <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
8403 everywhere. Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
8404 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
8405 the viewers do not like this. This fact is well known to the TV
8406 channels. See for example the BBC white paper
8407 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
8408 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
8409 summary of the problem domain. To better address the need for even
8410 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
8411 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
8412 standardizing loudness. From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
8413 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
8414 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
8415
8416 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
8417 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
8418 having a way to measure is not enough. To get the same loudness
8419 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
8420 on. For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
8421 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
8422 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
8423 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS. In Norway, I have been
8424 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
8425 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
8426
8427 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
8428 level using the LUFS. In Debian, I am aware of a library named
8429 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
8430 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
8431 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
8432 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
8433 for NEW processing. I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
8434 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
8435 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
8436
8437 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
8438 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
8439 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
8440 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
8441 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
8442 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
8443 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
8444 NUUG member organisation</a>. The program seem to be able to measure
8445 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
8446 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files. I suspect it
8447 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
8448
8449 </div>
8450 <div class="tags">
8451
8452
8453 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>.
8454
8455
8456 </div>
8457 </div>
8458 <div class="padding"></div>
8459
8460 <div class="entry">
8461 <div class="title">
8462 <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>
8463 </div>
8464 <div class="date">
8465 10th May 2015
8466 </div>
8467 <div class="body">
8468 <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
8469 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
8470 criminal or not, are
8471 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
8472 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
8473 ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
8474 years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to
8475 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
8476 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
8477 and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan
8478 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
8479 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
8480 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
8481 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
8482 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
8483 the police.</p>
8484
8485 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
8486 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
8487 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
8488 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
8489 the face and other information about the person. Some of the
8490 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
8491 system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will
8492 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
8493 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
8494 is good to know that
8495 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
8496 encryption is already broken</a>. And they
8497 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
8498 be read from 70 meters away</a>. This can be mitigated a bit by
8499 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
8500 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
8501 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
8502 business getting access to that information.</p>
8503
8504 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
8505 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
8506 of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports,
8507 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
8508 That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I
8509 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
8510 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
8511
8512 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
8513 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
8514 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
8515 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
8516
8517 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
8518 really could make such decision, I wrote
8519 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
8520 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
8521 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
8522
8523 </div>
8524 <div class="tags">
8525
8526
8527 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>.
8528
8529
8530 </div>
8531 </div>
8532 <div class="padding"></div>
8533
8534 <div class="entry">
8535 <div class="title">
8536 <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>
8537 </div>
8538 <div class="date">
8539 1st May 2015
8540 </div>
8541 <div class="body">
8542 <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
8543 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
8544 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
8545 year. I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
8546 like today. To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
8547 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
8548 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
8549
8550 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
8551 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
8552 the 2012 numbers are from
8553 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
8554 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
8555 email. I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
8556 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
8557 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
8558
8559 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
8560 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
8561 enough. See for example a
8562 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
8563 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives. 8 Kbit/s is 60
8564 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
8565 to get the storage requirements.</p>
8566
8567 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
8568 availability requirements etc. But a simple way to calculate can be
8569 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
8570 it to take space, power and redundancy into account. It could be much
8571 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
8572
8573 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
8574 calls in Norway? Not much. Here is a small table showing the
8575 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
8576 and large organisations:</p>
8577
8578 <table border="1">
8579 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
8580 <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>
8581 <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>
8582 <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>
8583 </table>
8584
8585 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage. Maintenance need to be
8586 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
8587 for the reader. But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
8588 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
8589 stopped because it is too expensive. I wonder if someone already is
8590 collecting the data?</p>
8591
8592 </div>
8593 <div class="tags">
8594
8595
8596 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>.
8597
8598
8599 </div>
8600 </div>
8601 <div class="padding"></div>
8602
8603 <div class="entry">
8604 <div class="title">
8605 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
8606 </div>
8607 <div class="date">
8608 26th April 2015
8609 </div>
8610 <div class="body">
8611 <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
8612 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
8613 announcement today</a>:</p>
8614
8615 <pre>
8616 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
8617 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
8618 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
8619 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
8620
8621 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
8622 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
8623 later today ;)
8624
8625 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
8626 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
8627 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
8628 be possible and encouraged!
8629
8630 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
8631 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
8632
8633 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
8634 operating system for schools, universities and other
8635 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
8636 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
8637 will work in harmony on the school network. With Debian Edu, the
8638 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
8639 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
8640 days.
8641
8642 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
8643 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
8644 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
8645 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
8646
8647 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
8648 installation instructions are available, including detailed
8649 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
8650 up a network or adding users. Please note that the password for the
8651 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
8652 least 5 characters!
8653
8654 == Where to download ==
8655
8656 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
8657 can be downloaded at the following locations:
8658
8659 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
8660 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
8661
8662 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
8663
8664 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
8665 available, with more software included (saving additional download
8666 time):
8667
8668 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
8669 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
8670
8671 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
8672
8673 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
8674 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
8675 options.
8676
8677 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
8678
8679 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
8680 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
8681
8682 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
8683 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
8684 for Spanish. See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
8685 online version of the translated manual.
8686
8687 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
8688 release notes and the installation manual:
8689 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
8690 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
8691
8692
8693 == Errata / known problems ==
8694
8695 It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
8696 DHCP (#780461).
8697
8698 The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
8699
8700 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
8701 hostname immediately.
8702
8703 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
8704 more current and complete list.
8705
8706 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
8707
8708 === Software updates ===
8709
8710 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
8711
8712 * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
8713 i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
8714 Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
8715
8716 * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
8717 Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
8718 * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
8719 * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
8720 the others see the manual.
8721 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
8722 * LibreOffice 4.3.3
8723 * GOsa 2.7.4
8724 * LTSP 5.5.4
8725 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
8726 * new boot framework: systemd
8727 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
8728 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
8729 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
8730 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
8731 * golearn 0.9
8732 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
8733 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
8734 * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
8735 * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
8736 notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
8737
8738 === Installation changes ===
8739
8740 Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
8741 for the hardware present.
8742
8743 === Fixed bugs ===
8744
8745 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
8746 from a user perspective:
8747
8748 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
8749 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
8750 information is corrected (710362)
8751
8752 * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
8753
8754 === Sugar desktop removed ===
8755
8756 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
8757 available in Debian Edu jessie.
8758
8759
8760 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
8761
8762 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
8763 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
8764 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
8765 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
8766 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
8767 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
8768 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
8769 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
8770 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
8771 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
8772 services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
8773 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
8774 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
8775 environment.
8776
8777 == About Debian ==
8778
8779 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
8780 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
8781 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
8782 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
8783 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
8784 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
8785 operating system.
8786
8787 == Thanks ==
8788
8789 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
8790 You rock.
8791 </pre>
8792
8793 </div>
8794 <div class="tags">
8795
8796
8797 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8798
8799
8800 </div>
8801 </div>
8802 <div class="padding"></div>
8803
8804 <div class="entry">
8805 <div class="title">
8806 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
8807 </div>
8808 <div class="date">
8809 15th April 2015
8810 </div>
8811 <div class="body">
8812 <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
8813 computer system for schools I've involved in,
8814 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
8815 being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
8816 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
8817 Agarwal.</p>
8818
8819 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8820
8821 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
8822 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
8823 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
8824 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
8825 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
8826 few software start-ups as well.</p>
8827
8828 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8829 project?</strong></p>
8830
8831 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
8832 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
8833 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
8834 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
8835 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
8836 it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
8837 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
8838
8839 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8840 Edu?</strong></p>
8841
8842 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
8843 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
8844 figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
8845 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
8846 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
8847 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
8848 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
8849 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
8850
8851 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
8852 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
8853 possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a
8854 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
8855 for the developer per-se.</p>
8856
8857 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8858 Edu?</strong></p>
8859
8860 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
8861 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
8862 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
8863
8864 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
8865 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
8866 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
8867 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
8868 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
8869 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
8870 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
8871
8872 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
8873 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
8874 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
8875
8876 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
8877 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
8878 interactive manner. While sites such as the
8879 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
8880 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
8881 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
8882 if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
8883 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
8884 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
8885 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
8886 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
8887 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
8888 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
8889 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
8890
8891 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
8892 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
8893 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
8894 also be used.</p>
8895
8896 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
8897 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it
8898 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
8899 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
8900 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
8901 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
8902 the user's input.</p>
8903
8904 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
8905 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
8906 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
8907 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
8908 nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
8909 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
8910 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
8911 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
8912
8913 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
8914 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
8915 lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
8916 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
8917 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
8918 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
8919 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
8920 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
8921
8922 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8923
8924 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
8925 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
8926 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
8927 between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between
8928 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
8929
8930 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8931 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8932
8933 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
8934 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
8935 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
8936 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
8937 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
8938 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
8939
8940 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
8941 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
8942 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
8943 well.</p>
8944
8945 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
8946 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
8947 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
8948 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
8949
8950 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
8951 and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
8952 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
8953 innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
8954 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
8955 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
8956 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
8957 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
8958 releases.</p>
8959
8960 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
8961 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
8962 is aimed at.
8963
8964 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
8965 around 2 years, and
8966 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
8967 some experience</a> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
8968 there was :</p>
8969
8970 <ol>
8971
8972 <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
8973 and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
8974 portion/syllabus given.</li>
8975
8976 <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
8977 is in the syllabus.</li>
8978
8979 <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
8980 times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
8981 you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
8982 say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
8983 as recognizable as say a
8984 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
8985 Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
8986 possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
8987 which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
8988 parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
8989 something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
8990
8991 </ol>
8992
8993 </div>
8994 <div class="tags">
8995
8996
8997 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
8998
8999
9000 </div>
9001 </div>
9002 <div class="padding"></div>
9003
9004 <div class="entry">
9005 <div class="title">
9006 <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>
9007 </div>
9008 <div class="date">
9009 7th April 2015
9010 </div>
9011 <div class="body">
9012 <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
9013 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
9014 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
9015
9016 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
9017 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
9018 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
9019 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As
9020 part of my involvement with the
9021 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
9022 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
9023 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
9024 Hackathon with our friends
9025 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
9026 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>. This part is
9027 named the 'My Society' track in the program. There is still space for
9028 more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.</p>
9029
9030 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
9031 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
9032
9033 </div>
9034 <div class="tags">
9035
9036
9037 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>.
9038
9039
9040 </div>
9041 </div>
9042 <div class="padding"></div>
9043
9044 <div class="entry">
9045 <div class="title">
9046 <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>
9047 </div>
9048 <div class="date">
9049 4th April 2015
9050 </div>
9051 <div class="body">
9052 <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
9053 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
9054 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
9055 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
9056 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
9057 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
9058 check the text up to chapter 13. The current status is available on the
9059 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
9060 project pages. You can also check out the
9061 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
9062 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
9063 and HTML version available in the
9064 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
9065 directory</a>.</p>
9066
9067 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
9068 you find any.</p>
9069
9070 </div>
9071 <div class="tags">
9072
9073
9074 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>.
9075
9076
9077 </div>
9078 </div>
9079 <div class="padding"></div>
9080
9081 <div class="entry">
9082 <div class="title">
9083 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
9084 </div>
9085 <div class="date">
9086 9th March 2015
9087 </div>
9088 <div class="body">
9089 <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
9090 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
9091 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
9092 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
9093 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
9094 audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
9095 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
9096 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
9097 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
9098 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
9099 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
9100 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
9101 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
9102 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
9103
9104 <p>The list of NUUG videos
9105 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
9106 include things like a
9107 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
9108 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
9109 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
9110 re-implementation</a>, the
9111 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
9112 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
9113 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
9114 video</A> and many others.</p>
9115
9116 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
9117 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
9118 spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
9119 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
9120 channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
9121 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
9122 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
9123 focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
9124 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
9125 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
9126
9127 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
9128 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
9129 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
9130 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
9131 channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
9132 do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
9133 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
9134 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
9135 produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
9136 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
9137
9138 </div>
9139 <div class="tags">
9140
9141
9142 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>.
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/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
9152 </div>
9153 <div class="date">
9154 28th February 2015
9155 </div>
9156 <div class="body">
9157 <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
9158 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
9159 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
9160 finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
9161 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
9162 made for
9163 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
9164 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
9165 This is great news. As part of my involvement with
9166 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
9167 a friend have
9168 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
9169 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
9170 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
9171 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
9172 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
9173 it happen ourselves.
9174 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
9175 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
9176 is.</p>
9177
9178 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
9179 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
9180
9181 </div>
9182 <div class="tags">
9183
9184
9185 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>.
9186
9187
9188 </div>
9189 </div>
9190 <div class="padding"></div>
9191
9192 <div class="entry">
9193 <div class="title">
9194 <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>
9195 </div>
9196 <div class="date">
9197 25th February 2015
9198 </div>
9199 <div class="body">
9200 <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
9201 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
9202 strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
9203 television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
9204 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
9205 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
9206 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
9207 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00
9208 and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years
9209 with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
9210 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
9211 the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on
9212 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>. And
9213 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
9214 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
9215 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
9216 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
9217
9218 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
9219 to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and
9220 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
9221 with VLC.</p>
9222
9223 <ul>
9224 <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
9225 <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
9226 </ul>
9227
9228 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
9229 and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure
9230 out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
9231 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
9232 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to
9233 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently
9234 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
9235
9236 <blockquote><pre>
9237 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
9238 --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
9239 --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
9240 </pre></blockquote>
9241
9242 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
9243 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to
9244 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
9245 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
9246
9247 </div>
9248 <div class="tags">
9249
9250
9251 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>.
9252
9253
9254 </div>
9255 </div>
9256 <div class="padding"></div>
9257
9258 <div class="entry">
9259 <div class="title">
9260 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
9261 </div>
9262 <div class="date">
9263 10th February 2015
9264 </div>
9265 <div class="body">
9266 <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
9267 that
9268 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
9269 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
9270 main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body
9271 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this
9272 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
9273 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
9274 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
9275 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
9276 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
9277 public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression
9278 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
9279 the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still
9280 taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for
9281 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
9282 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
9283
9284 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
9285 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
9286 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
9287 controversy about these scanners.</p>
9288
9289 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
9290 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
9291 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
9292
9293 </div>
9294 <div class="tags">
9295
9296
9297 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>.
9298
9299
9300 </div>
9301 </div>
9302 <div class="padding"></div>
9303
9304 <div class="entry">
9305 <div class="title">
9306 <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>
9307 </div>
9308 <div class="date">
9309 8th February 2015
9310 </div>
9311 <div class="body">
9312 <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
9313 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working. As I
9314 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
9315 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
9316 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
9317 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
9318 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them. If
9319 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
9320 the stream and an alarm should be triggered. The script is written as
9321 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
9322 and sound the alarm when something is wrong. It is able to detect
9323 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
9324
9325 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
9326 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
9327 git repository</a> on github. If you run a TV station with web
9328 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
9329
9330 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
9331 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
9332 distribute the TV content. The
9333 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
9334 station</a> is available from the Github project page. Everyone can
9335 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
9336 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
9337 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
9338 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
9339 content</a>. And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
9340 following activity, we now have the schedule
9341 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
9342 XMLTV</a> too. Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
9343 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
9344 most welcome. Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
9345
9346 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
9347 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
9348 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
9349 loss and burst bandwidth usage. It look useful to check if UDP
9350 streams are working as they should.</p>
9351
9352 </div>
9353 <div class="tags">
9354
9355
9356 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>.
9357
9358
9359 </div>
9360 </div>
9361 <div class="padding"></div>
9362
9363 <div class="entry">
9364 <div class="title">
9365 <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>
9366 </div>
9367 <div class="date">
9368 12th January 2015
9369 </div>
9370 <div class="body">
9371 <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
9372 Foundation</a> announced a new video
9373 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
9374 Free software</a> in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is
9375 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
9376 way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several
9377 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
9378 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
9379
9380 <p>But today I was told that
9381 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
9382 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
9383 subtitles based on these. The result has been sent to FSF and made
9384 available in
9385 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
9386 git repository</a> provided by Github. Please let me know if you find
9387 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
9388
9389 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
9390 Libreplanet
9391 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
9392 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
9393
9394 </div>
9395 <div class="tags">
9396
9397
9398 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>.
9399
9400
9401 </div>
9402 </div>
9403 <div class="padding"></div>
9404
9405 <div class="entry">
9406 <div class="title">
9407 <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>
9408 </div>
9409 <div class="date">
9410 30th December 2014
9411 </div>
9412 <div class="body">
9413 <p>I am very happy that we in the
9414 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
9415 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
9416 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
9417 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
9418 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>. This
9419 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
9420 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
9421 seem to hold up the pressure. The
9422 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
9423 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
9424
9425 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
9426 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
9427 authorities. Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
9428 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
9429 reports in public.</p>
9430
9431 </div>
9432 <div class="tags">
9433
9434
9435 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>.
9436
9437
9438 </div>
9439 </div>
9440 <div class="padding"></div>
9441
9442 <div class="entry">
9443 <div class="title">
9444 <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>
9445 </div>
9446 <div class="date">
9447 19th December 2014
9448 </div>
9449 <div class="body">
9450 <p>So, Sony caved in
9451 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
9452 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
9453 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
9454 to Newt Gingrich</a>). It should not surprise anyone, after the
9455 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
9456 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
9457 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
9458 the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their
9459 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
9460 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
9461 by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities
9462 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
9463 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
9464
9465 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
9466 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
9467 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
9468 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
9469
9470 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
9471 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
9472 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
9473 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
9474 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
9475 income. :)</p>
9476
9477 </div>
9478 <div class="tags">
9479
9480
9481 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>.
9482
9483
9484 </div>
9485 </div>
9486 <div class="padding"></div>
9487
9488 <div class="entry">
9489 <div class="title">
9490 <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>
9491 </div>
9492 <div class="date">
9493 22nd November 2014
9494 </div>
9495 <div class="body">
9496 <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
9497 sysvinit as its boot system by default. But how can one keep using
9498 sysvinit in Jessie? It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
9499 courtesy of
9500 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
9501 Schubert</a> and
9502 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
9503 McVittie</a>.
9504
9505 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
9506 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
9507 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
9508 you upgrade:</p>
9509
9510 <p><blockquote><pre>
9511 Package: systemd-sysv
9512 Pin: release o=Debian
9513 Pin-Priority: -1
9514 </pre></blockquote><p>
9515
9516 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
9517 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
9518 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
9519 systemd as a default boot system. The end result should be that the
9520 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
9521
9522 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
9523 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
9524 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
9525 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot. Either by
9526 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
9527 preseed file used. First, the kernel command line argument:
9528
9529 <p><blockquote><pre>
9530 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
9531 </pre></blockquote><p>
9532
9533 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
9534
9535 <p><blockquote><pre>
9536 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
9537 </pre></blockquote><p>
9538
9539 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
9540 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
9541
9542 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
9543 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
9544 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
9545 devices show up during boot. But on the other hand, the new default
9546 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
9547 Jessie is released.</p>
9548
9549 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
9550 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
9551 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
9552 line.</p>
9553
9554 </div>
9555 <div class="tags">
9556
9557
9558 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>.
9559
9560
9561 </div>
9562 </div>
9563 <div class="padding"></div>
9564
9565 <div class="entry">
9566 <div class="title">
9567 <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>
9568 </div>
9569 <div class="date">
9570 10th November 2014
9571 </div>
9572 <div class="body">
9573 <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
9574 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
9575 democracy. But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
9576
9577 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
9578 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
9579 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
9580 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor. Such SMTP option would be
9581 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
9582 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
9583 to the people peeking on the wire. I
9584 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
9585 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
9586 lot of useful feedback and suggestions. It also became obvious to me
9587 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
9588 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
9589 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
9590 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
9591 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
9592
9593 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
9594 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
9595 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion. With such addresses
9596 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
9597 go to the correct SMTP server. To do this, one need to configure the
9598 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
9599 emails for this .onion domain. To learn more about Exim configuration
9600 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
9601 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
9602 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian. Getting it to work
9603 were fairly easy, and
9604 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
9605 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github. I
9606 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
9607 useful approach.</p>
9608
9609 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
9610 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
9611 get rid of exim4). Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
9612 above, build the deb and install it on the machine. Next, run
9613 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
9614 the instructions to get the service up and running. Restart tor and
9615 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
9616 this:</p>
9617
9618 <p><blockquote><pre>
9619 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
9620 --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
9621 </pre></blockquote></p>
9622
9623 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor. Replace the email
9624 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
9625
9626 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
9627 easier and more automatic. Especially the tor setup need more work.
9628 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
9629 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
9630 architecture independent. It would probably also make the code easier
9631 to review. The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
9632 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd. It would be better if
9633 no daemon and no socket is needed. I suspect it is possible to get
9634 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
9635 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
9636 system.</p>
9637
9638 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
9639 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
9640 SMTorP. :)</p>
9641
9642 </div>
9643 <div class="tags">
9644
9645
9646 Tags: <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>.
9647
9648
9649 </div>
9650 </div>
9651 <div class="padding"></div>
9652
9653 <div class="entry">
9654 <div class="title">
9655 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
9656 </div>
9657 <div class="date">
9658 27th October 2014
9659 </div>
9660 <div class="body">
9661 <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
9662 sent out
9663 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
9664 announcement</a>:</p>
9665
9666 <pre>
9667 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
9668 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
9669
9670 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
9671 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
9672 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
9673 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
9674 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
9675 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
9676 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
9677
9678 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
9679 installation instructions are available, including detailed
9680 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
9681 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
9682 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
9683 of at least 5 characters!
9684
9685 [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
9686
9687 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
9688 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
9689 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
9690 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
9691 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
9692
9693 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
9694 mostly in Germany and Norway.
9695
9696 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
9697 ===============================
9698
9699 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
9700 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
9701 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
9702 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
9703 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
9704 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
9705 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
9706 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
9707 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
9708 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
9709 services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
9710 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
9711 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
9712 environment.
9713
9714 [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
9715 [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;
9716
9717 Full release notes and manual
9718 =============================
9719
9720 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
9721 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
9722 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
9723 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
9724 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
9725
9726 [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
9727 [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
9728
9729 Where to get it
9730 ---------------
9731
9732 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
9733
9734 * <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>
9735 * <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>
9736 * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
9737
9738 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
9739
9740 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
9741 ===============================================================================
9742
9743
9744 Installation changes
9745 --------------------
9746
9747 * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
9748
9749 Software updates
9750 ----------------
9751
9752 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
9753
9754 * Linux kernel 3.16.x
9755 * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
9756 LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
9757 choose one of the others see manual.)
9758 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
9759 * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
9760 * GOsa 2.7.4
9761 * LTSP 5.5.4
9762 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
9763 * new boot framework: systemd
9764 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
9765 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
9766 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
9767 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
9768 * golearn 0.9
9769 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
9770 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
9771 * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
9772 installation.
9773 * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
9774 notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
9775
9776 [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
9777 [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
9778
9779 Fixed bugs
9780 ----------
9781
9782 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
9783 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
9784 information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
9785 * and many others.
9786
9787 Documentation and translation updates
9788 -------------------------------------
9789
9790 * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
9791 Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
9792 Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
9793
9794 Other changes
9795 -------------
9796
9797 * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
9798 server takes more time.
9799 * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
9800 doesn't work.
9801
9802 Regressions / known problems
9803 ----------------------------
9804
9805 * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
9806 exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
9807 and Debian bug #762103).
9808 * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
9809 #764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
9810 * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
9811 work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
9812 Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
9813
9814 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
9815
9816 [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
9817
9818 How to report bugs
9819 ------------------
9820
9821 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
9822
9823 About Debian
9824 ============
9825
9826 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
9827 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
9828 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
9829 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
9830 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
9831 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
9832 operating system.
9833
9834 Contact Information
9835 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
9836 mail to press@debian.org.
9837
9838 [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
9839 </pre>
9840
9841 </div>
9842 <div class="tags">
9843
9844
9845 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9846
9847
9848 </div>
9849 </div>
9850 <div class="padding"></div>
9851
9852 <div class="entry">
9853 <div class="title">
9854 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
9855 </div>
9856 <div class="date">
9857 23rd October 2014
9858 </div>
9859 <div class="body">
9860 <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
9861 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
9862 the surrounding countries. I had volunteered on behalf of the
9863 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
9864 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
9865 a row. There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
9866 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
9867 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
9868 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
9869 live.</p>
9870
9871 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
9872 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
9873 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
9874 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account. The videos have the license
9875 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
9876 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
9877 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>. Many great
9878 talks available. Check it out! :)</p>
9879
9880 </div>
9881 <div class="tags">
9882
9883
9884 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>.
9885
9886
9887 </div>
9888 </div>
9889 <div class="padding"></div>
9890
9891 <div class="entry">
9892 <div class="title">
9893 <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>
9894 </div>
9895 <div class="date">
9896 22nd October 2014
9897 </div>
9898 <div class="body">
9899 <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
9900 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
9901 operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
9902 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
9903 and various options for each email address. This take a while for
9904 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
9905 job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
9906 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
9907 listadmin program</a>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
9908 to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
9909 lists I recently took over:</p>
9910
9911 <p><blockquote><pre>
9912 % time listadmin xiph
9913 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
9914 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
9915
9916 real 0m1.709s
9917 user 0m0.232s
9918 sys 0m0.012s
9919 %
9920 </pre></blockquote></p>
9921
9922 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
9923 there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
9924 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
9925 minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
9926 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
9927 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
9928 program.</p>
9929
9930 <p>If you install
9931 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
9932 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
9933 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
9934
9935 <p><blockquote><pre>
9936 username username@example.org
9937 spamlevel 23
9938 default discard
9939 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
9940
9941 password secret
9942 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
9943 mailman-list@lists.example.com
9944
9945 password hidden
9946 other-list@otherserver.example.org
9947 </pre></blockquote></p>
9948
9949 <p>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
9950 learn the details.</p>
9951
9952 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
9953 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
9954 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
9955 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
9956
9957 <p><blockquote><pre>
9958 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
9959 </pre></blockquote></p>
9960
9961 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
9962 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
9963 initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
9964 lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
9965 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
9966 email.</p>
9967
9968 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
9969 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
9970 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
9971 time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
9972 software.</p>
9973
9974 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9975 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9976 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9977
9978 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
9979 configuration example. Also, I've been told that the
9980 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
9981 sure why.</p>
9982
9983 </div>
9984 <div class="tags">
9985
9986
9987 Tags: <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>.
9988
9989
9990 </div>
9991 </div>
9992 <div class="padding"></div>
9993
9994 <div class="entry">
9995 <div class="title">
9996 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
9997 </div>
9998 <div class="date">
9999 17th October 2014
10000 </div>
10001 <div class="body">
10002 <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
10003 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
10004 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
10005 Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
10006 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
10007 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
10008 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
10009
10010 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
10011 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
10012 the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
10013 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
10014 of this story.)</p>
10015
10016 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
10017 values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
10018 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
10019 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
10020 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
10021 isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
10022 for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
10023 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
10024 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
10025 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
10026
10027 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
10028 most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
10029 the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
10030 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
10031
10032 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
10033 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
10034
10035 <p><blockquote><pre>
10036 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
10037 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
10038 </pre></blockquote></p>
10039
10040 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
10041 both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
10042 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later. Installing both
10043 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
10044 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
10045 and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
10046 default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
10047 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
10048
10049 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
10050 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
10051
10052 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
10053 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
10054 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
10055 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
10056 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
10057
10058 <p><blockquote><pre>
10059 Task: isenkram-packages
10060 Section: hardware
10061 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
10062 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
10063 proposed.
10064 Test-new-install: show show
10065 Relevance: 8
10066 Packages: for-current-hardware
10067
10068 Task: isenkram-firmware
10069 Section: hardware
10070 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
10071 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
10072 packages are proposed.
10073 Test-new-install: mark show
10074 Relevance: 8
10075 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
10076 </pre></blockquote></p>
10077
10078 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
10079 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
10080 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
10081 list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
10082 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
10083
10084 <p><blockquote><pre>
10085 #!/bin/sh
10086 #
10087 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
10088 export PATH
10089 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
10090 </pre></blockquote></p>
10091
10092 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
10093 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
10094
10095 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
10096 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
10097 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
10098 install.</p>
10099
10100 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
10101 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
10102 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
10103
10104 </div>
10105 <div class="tags">
10106
10107
10108 Tags: <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>.
10109
10110
10111 </div>
10112 </div>
10113 <div class="padding"></div>
10114
10115 <div class="entry">
10116 <div class="title">
10117 <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>
10118 </div>
10119 <div class="date">
10120 4th October 2014
10121 </div>
10122 <div class="body">
10123 <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen. Above the
10124 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
10125 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
10126 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
10127
10128 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
10129
10130 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
10131 about this hidden Linux installation. It is interesting what
10132 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
10133
10134 </div>
10135 <div class="tags">
10136
10137
10138 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10139
10140
10141 </div>
10142 </div>
10143 <div class="padding"></div>
10144
10145 <div class="entry">
10146 <div class="title">
10147 <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>
10148 </div>
10149 <div class="date">
10150 4th October 2014
10151 </div>
10152 <div class="body">
10153 <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
10154 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
10155 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
10156 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
10157 Dibb.</p>
10158
10159 <p>I just wrapped up
10160 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
10161 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
10162 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
10163 download page</a>. This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
10164 0.17.</p>
10165
10166 <ul>
10167
10168 <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
10169 <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
10170 non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
10171 <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
10172 <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
10173 <li>Fix include orders</li>
10174 <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
10175 <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
10176 <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
10177 the palette size is the same.</li>
10178 <li>Fix array printing.</li>
10179 <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
10180 <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
10181 <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
10182 with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
10183
10184 </ul>
10185
10186 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
10187 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
10188 project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)</p>
10189
10190 </div>
10191 <div class="tags">
10192
10193
10194 Tags: <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>.
10195
10196
10197 </div>
10198 </div>
10199 <div class="padding"></div>
10200
10201 <div class="entry">
10202 <div class="title">
10203 <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>
10204 </div>
10205 <div class="date">
10206 26th September 2014
10207 </div>
10208 <div class="body">
10209 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10210 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
10211 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
10212 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
10213 boot of both clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
10214 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
10215 to mention here). We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
10216 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
10217 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
10218 future. The
10219 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
10220 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
10221 work left. Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
10222 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway. Here is a
10223 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
10224
10225 <p>First, download the test ISO via
10226 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
10227 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
10228 or rsync (use
10229 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
10230 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
10231 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
10232 install with some tweaking.</p>
10233
10234 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
10235 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
10236
10237 <p><blockquote><pre>
10238 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
10239 </pre></blockquote></p>
10240
10241 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
10242 optimization. Return to the installation, select the profile you want
10243 and continue. Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
10244 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
10245
10246 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
10247 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be. All my
10248 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
10249 your need.</p>
10250
10251 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
10252 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
10253 education-desktop-XXX metapackage. XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
10254 or mate. If you want several desktop options, install more than one
10255 metapackage. Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
10256 graphical login screen. This workaround should no longer be needed
10257 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
10258 days.</p>
10259
10260 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
10261 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
10262 update the debian-cd git repository. The eatmydata, grub and desktop
10263 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
10264 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again. Well the
10265 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled. The proper fix
10266 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
10267 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
10268 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
10269
10270 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
10271 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
10272 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
10273
10274 </div>
10275 <div class="tags">
10276
10277
10278 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>.
10279
10280
10281 </div>
10282 </div>
10283 <div class="padding"></div>
10284
10285 <div class="entry">
10286 <div class="title">
10287 <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>
10288 </div>
10289 <div class="date">
10290 25th September 2014
10291 </div>
10292 <div class="body">
10293 <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
10294 to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line
10295 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
10296 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen
10297 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
10298 its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
10299 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
10300 project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to
10301 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
10302 into Debian</a>. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
10303 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
10304 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
10305 over. And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
10306
10307 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
10308 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
10309 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
10310 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
10311 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
10312 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got
10313 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
10314 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
10315 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
10316 list</a>. :)</p>
10317
10318 </div>
10319 <div class="tags">
10320
10321
10322 Tags: <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>.
10323
10324
10325 </div>
10326 </div>
10327 <div class="padding"></div>
10328
10329 <div class="entry">
10330 <div class="title">
10331 <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>
10332 </div>
10333 <div class="date">
10334 16th September 2014
10335 </div>
10336 <div class="body">
10337 <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
10338 a lot quicker. When we install more than 2000 packages in
10339 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
10340 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
10341 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
10342 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
10343 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
10344 responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code
10345 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
10346 installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
10347 me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
10348 to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is
10349 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
10350 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
10351
10352 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
10353 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
10354 change the code in several packages. The idea is not new, but I have
10355 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before. It
10356 depend on the small and clever package
10357 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
10358 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
10359 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
10360 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly. Instead of
10361 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
10362 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
10363 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
10364 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
10365 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
10366 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
10367 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
10368
10369 <p>The effect was stunning. In my first test it reduced the running
10370 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
10371 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
10372 Latitude D505 machine. I am not quite sure what the optimised time
10373 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
10374 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
10375 installation. As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
10376 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
10377 installation. I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
10378 and got these results. The time measured is the time stamp in
10379 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
10380 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
10381 yourself. In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
10382 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
10383 dialog.</p>
10384
10385 <p><table>
10386
10387 <tr>
10388 <th>Machine/setup</th>
10389 <th>Original tasksel</th>
10390 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
10391 <th>Reduction</th>
10392 </tr>
10393
10394 <tr>
10395 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
10396 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
10397 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
10398 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
10399 </tr>
10400
10401 <tr>
10402 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
10403 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
10404 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
10405 <td>23 min 40%</td>
10406 </tr>
10407
10408 <tr>
10409 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
10410 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
10411 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
10412 <td>11 min 50%</td>
10413 </tr>
10414
10415 <tr>
10416 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
10417 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
10418 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
10419 <td>2 min 33%</td>
10420 </tr>
10421
10422 <tr>
10423 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
10424 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
10425 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
10426 <td>4 min 21%</td>
10427 </tr>
10428
10429 </table></p>
10430
10431 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
10432 time is spent downloading packages. The connection to the Internet
10433 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
10434 significant factor in the measurement. Download typically took a few
10435 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
10436 installed.</p>
10437
10438 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
10439 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
10440 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
10441 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
10442 installation. I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
10443 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
10444 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
10445 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO. The
10446 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
10447 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i. If the code is
10448 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
10449 for the entire installation.</p>
10450
10451 <p>I've implemented this in the
10452 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
10453 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
10454 Debian Edu installation. If you want to test this yourself, you can
10455 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb). One shell script
10456 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
10457
10458 <p><blockquote><pre>
10459 #!/bin/sh
10460 set -e
10461 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
10462 info() {
10463 logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
10464 }
10465 error() {
10466 logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
10467 }
10468 override_install() {
10469 apt-install eatmydata || true
10470 if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
10471 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
10472 file=/usr/bin/$bin
10473 # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
10474 if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
10475 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
10476 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
10477 > /target$file.edu
10478 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
10479 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
10480 --rename --quiet --add $file
10481 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
10482 else
10483 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
10484 fi
10485 done
10486 else
10487 error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
10488 fi
10489 }
10490
10491 override_install
10492 </pre></blockquote></p>
10493
10494 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
10495 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
10496
10497 <p><blockquote><pre>
10498 #! /bin/sh -e
10499 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
10500 error() {
10501 logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
10502 }
10503 remove_install_override() {
10504 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
10505 file=/usr/bin/$bin
10506 if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
10507 rm /target$file
10508 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
10509 --rename --quiet --remove $file
10510 rm /target$file.edu
10511 else
10512 error "Missing divert for $file."
10513 fi
10514 done
10515 sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
10516 }
10517
10518 remove_install_override
10519 </pre></blockquote></p>
10520
10521 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
10522 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
10523 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
10524
10525 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
10526 Debian installer too? I suspect it should, but am not sure the
10527 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough. It also
10528 depend on the side effects of the change. I'm not aware of any, but I
10529 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
10530 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
10531 fsync() having effect? Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
10532 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
10533 everyone.</p>
10534
10535 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
10536 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
10537 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>. An updated
10538 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
10539
10540 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
10541 the optimization work again. And I have discovered that the
10542 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
10543 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package. See
10544 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
10545
10546 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
10547 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
10548 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
10549 optimization again. If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
10550 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
10551
10552 </div>
10553 <div class="tags">
10554
10555
10556 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>.
10557
10558
10559 </div>
10560 </div>
10561 <div class="padding"></div>
10562
10563 <div class="entry">
10564 <div class="title">
10565 <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>
10566 </div>
10567 <div class="date">
10568 10th September 2014
10569 </div>
10570 <div class="body">
10571 <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
10572 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
10573 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
10574 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
10575 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
10576 use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used
10577 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
10578 were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used
10579 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope
10580 those problems are gone now.</p>
10581
10582 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
10583 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
10584 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
10585 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be
10586 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
10587
10588 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
10589 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
10590 not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?</p>
10591
10592 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
10593 line:</p>
10594
10595 <p><blockquote><pre>
10596 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
10597 </pre></blockquote></p>
10598
10599 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
10600 entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
10601 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
10602 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
10603
10604 <p><blockquote><pre>
10605 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
10606 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
10607 %
10608 </pre></blockquote></p>
10609
10610 <p>Now if only
10611 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
10612 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
10613 very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
10614 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
10615 another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
10616 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
10617 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
10618 This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something
10619 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
10620
10621 </div>
10622 <div class="tags">
10623
10624
10625 Tags: <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>.
10626
10627
10628 </div>
10629 </div>
10630 <div class="padding"></div>
10631
10632 <div class="entry">
10633 <div class="title">
10634 <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>
10635 </div>
10636 <div class="date">
10637 25th August 2014
10638 </div>
10639 <div class="body">
10640 <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
10641 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
10642 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
10643 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
10644 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>. If one
10645 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
10646 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
10647 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I
10648 am not sure.
10649 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
10650 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
10651 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
10652 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
10653 LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other
10654 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
10655 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating
10656 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
10657 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
10658 licenses are.</p>
10659
10660 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
10661 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
10662 end user</a>
10663 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
10664 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
10665
10666 <p><blockquote>
10667 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
10668 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
10669
10670 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
10671 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
10672 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
10673 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
10674 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
10675 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
10676 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
10677 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
10678 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
10679 LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
10680 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
10681 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
10682 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
10683 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
10684 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
10685 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
10686 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
10687 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
10688
10689 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
10690 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
10691
10692 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
10693 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
10694 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
10695 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
10696 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
10697 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
10698 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
10699 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
10700 </blockquote></p>
10701
10702 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
10703 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
10704
10705 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
10706 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
10707
10708 <p><blockquote>
10709
10710 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
10711 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
10712 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
10713 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
10714 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
10715 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
10716 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
10717 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
10718 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
10719 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
10720 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
10721 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
10722
10723 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
10724 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
10725 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
10726 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
10727 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
10728 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
10729 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
10730 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
10731 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
10732 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
10733 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
10734 additional details.</p>
10735
10736 </blockquote></p>
10737
10738 <p>Some free software like
10739 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
10740 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
10741 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
10742 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
10743
10744 </div>
10745 <div class="tags">
10746
10747
10748 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>.
10749
10750
10751 </div>
10752 </div>
10753 <div class="padding"></div>
10754
10755 <div class="entry">
10756 <div class="title">
10757 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
10758 </div>
10759 <div class="date">
10760 31st July 2014
10761 </div>
10762 <div class="body">
10763 <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
10764 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10765 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
10766 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
10767 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
10768 the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
10769
10770 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10771
10772 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
10773 employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
10774 haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
10775 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
10776 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
10777 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
10778 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
10779 works with Windows . :-(</p>
10780
10781 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
10782 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
10783 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
10784 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
10785 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
10786 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
10787
10788 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10789 project?</strong></p>
10790
10791 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
10792 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
10793 Harsewinkel</a>). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
10794 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
10795 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
10796 computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
10797 with this job.</p>
10798
10799 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10800 Edu?</strong></p>
10801
10802 <p>The independence.</p>
10803
10804 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
10805 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
10806 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
10807
10808 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
10809 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
10810 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
10811 working reliable. </p>
10812
10813 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
10814 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
10815 solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
10816 terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
10817 workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
10818 machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
10819 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
10820 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
10821
10822 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10823 Edu?</strong></p>
10824
10825 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users. &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
10826 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
10827 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
10828
10829 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10830
10831 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
10832 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
10833
10834 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10835 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10836
10837 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
10838 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
10839 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
10840 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
10841 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
10842 instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
10843 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
10844
10845 </div>
10846 <div class="tags">
10847
10848
10849 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10850
10851
10852 </div>
10853 </div>
10854 <div class="padding"></div>
10855
10856 <div class="entry">
10857 <div class="title">
10858 <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>
10859 </div>
10860 <div class="date">
10861 23rd July 2014
10862 </div>
10863 <div class="body">
10864 <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
10865 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
10866 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
10867 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
10868 law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There
10869 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
10870 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
10871 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
10872 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
10873 need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give
10874 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
10875 the translation show this very well:</p>
10876
10877 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
10878
10879 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
10880 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
10881 project pages and the
10882 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
10883 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10884 and HTML version available in the
10885 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
10886 directory</a>.</p>
10887
10888 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
10889 you find any.</p>
10890
10891 </div>
10892 <div class="tags">
10893
10894
10895 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>.
10896
10897
10898 </div>
10899 </div>
10900 <div class="padding"></div>
10901
10902 <div class="entry">
10903 <div class="title">
10904 <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>
10905 </div>
10906 <div class="date">
10907 17th June 2014
10908 </div>
10909 <div class="body">
10910 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10911 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
10912 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
10913 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
10914 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
10915
10916 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
10917 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
10918 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
10919 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
10920 in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
10921 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
10922 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
10923 edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
10924 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
10925 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
10926 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
10927 goals.</p>
10928
10929 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
10930 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
10931 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
10932 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
10933 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
10934 chapters together into one large web page (aka
10935 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
10936 AllInOne page</a>). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
10937 processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
10938 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
10939 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
10940 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
10941 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
10942 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
10943 manual. This process also download images and transform image
10944 references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
10945 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
10946 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
10947 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
10948 a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
10949 and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
10950 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
10951 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
10952 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
10953
10954 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
10955 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
10956 track the English original. For this we use the
10957 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
10958 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
10959 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
10960 translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
10961 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
10962 files), which the translations update with the native language
10963 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
10964 original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
10965 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
10966 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
10967 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
10968 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
10969 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
10970 of the documentation.</p>
10971
10972 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
10973 recommend using
10974 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
10975 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
10976 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
10977 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>. All we care about
10978 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
10979 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
10980 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
10981 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
10982
10983 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
10984 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
10985 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
10986 this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
10987 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
10988 translated images by storing translated versions in
10989 images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
10990 package maintainers know more.</p>
10991
10992 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
10993 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
10994 of the documentation packages on the web</a>. See for example the
10995 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
10996 PDF version</a> or the
10997 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
10998 HTML version</a>. We do not yet build the epub version by default,
10999 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
11000
11001 <p>To learn more, check out
11002 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
11003 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
11004 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
11005 manual on the wiki</a> and
11006 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
11007 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
11008
11009 </div>
11010 <div class="tags">
11011
11012
11013 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>.
11014
11015
11016 </div>
11017 </div>
11018 <div class="padding"></div>
11019
11020 <div class="entry">
11021 <div class="title">
11022 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
11023 </div>
11024 <div class="date">
11025 29th May 2014
11026 </div>
11027 <div class="body">
11028 <p>Dear lazyweb. I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
11029 in my car, connected to
11030 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
11031 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a
11032 GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own
11033 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>". But I
11034 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
11035 such car computer.</p>
11036
11037 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
11038
11039 <ul>
11040
11041 <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
11042
11043 <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
11044 fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
11045 or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from
11046 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
11047 info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
11048
11049 <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
11050 and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
11051 route.</li>
11052
11053 <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
11054
11055 <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
11056 to home server. Try IP over DNS
11057 (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
11058 (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
11059 connection do not work.</li>
11060
11061 <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
11062 or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
11063
11064 <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
11065 (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
11066
11067 <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
11068 run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
11069
11070 </ul>
11071
11072 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
11073 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
11074
11075 </div>
11076 <div class="tags">
11077
11078
11079 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11080
11081
11082 </div>
11083 </div>
11084 <div class="padding"></div>
11085
11086 <div class="entry">
11087 <div class="title">
11088 <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>
11089 </div>
11090 <div class="date">
11091 29th April 2014
11092 </div>
11093 <div class="body">
11094 <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
11095 project</a> for quite a while now. It is a free software
11096 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
11097 plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
11098 newer AVM2 format - see
11099 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
11100 allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly
11101 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
11102 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
11103 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
11104 support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark
11105 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
11106 so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately,
11107 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
11108 sites do not work yet.</p>
11109
11110 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
11111 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
11112 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
11113 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
11114 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
11115 the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock
11116 errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even
11117 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
11118 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
11119 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
11120 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
11121
11122 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
11123 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy
11124 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
11125 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that
11126 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
11127 the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the
11128 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
11129
11130 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
11131 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
11132 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
11133 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
11134 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
11135
11136 </div>
11137 <div class="tags">
11138
11139
11140 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>.
11141
11142
11143 </div>
11144 </div>
11145 <div class="padding"></div>
11146
11147 <div class="entry">
11148 <div class="title">
11149 <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>
11150 </div>
11151 <div class="date">
11152 23rd April 2014
11153 </div>
11154 <div class="body">
11155 <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
11156 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
11157 So I implemented one, using
11158 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
11159 package</a>. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
11160 run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option,
11161 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)". When you
11162 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
11163 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
11164
11165 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
11166 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
11167 packages to install. The first part is in
11168 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
11169 this:</p>
11170
11171 <p><blockquote><pre>
11172 Task: isenkram
11173 Section: hardware
11174 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
11175 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
11176 proposed.
11177 Test-new-install: mark show
11178 Relevance: 8
11179 Packages: for-current-hardware
11180 </pre></blockquote></p>
11181
11182 <p>The second part is in
11183 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
11184 this:</p>
11185
11186 <p><blockquote><pre>
11187 #!/bin/sh
11188 #
11189 (
11190 isenkram-lookup
11191 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
11192 ) | sort -u
11193 </pre></blockquote></p>
11194
11195 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
11196 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
11197 have installed on our machines. I've not been able to find a way to
11198 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
11199 before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful,
11200 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
11201
11202 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
11203 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
11204 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
11205 database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database
11206 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
11207 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
11208 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>). The cause is in
11209 the python-apt code (bug
11210 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
11211 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
11212 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
11213 around 2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop
11214 daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
11215 unstable today.</p>
11216
11217 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
11218 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
11219 use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper
11220 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
11221 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
11222 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
11223 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation. I
11224 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
11225 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
11226
11227 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
11228 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
11229 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
11230 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
11231 package. See also
11232 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
11233 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation. I expect
11234 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
11235 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
11236
11237 </div>
11238 <div class="tags">
11239
11240
11241 Tags: <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>.
11242
11243
11244 </div>
11245 </div>
11246 <div class="padding"></div>
11247
11248 <div class="entry">
11249 <div class="title">
11250 <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>
11251 </div>
11252 <div class="date">
11253 15th April 2014
11254 </div>
11255 <div class="body">
11256 <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
11257 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
11258 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
11259 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
11260 encrypted and away from prying eyes. It is still going strong, and
11261 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
11262
11263 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
11264 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was
11265 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
11266 during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is
11267 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
11268 Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
11269 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
11270
11271 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
11272 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
11273 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
11274 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
11275 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
11276 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
11277 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
11278 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>. There
11279 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User
11280 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki. Please
11281 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
11282 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
11283
11284 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
11285 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
11286 become root:</p>
11287
11288 <p><pre>
11289 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
11290 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
11291 u-boot-tools
11292 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
11293 freedom-maker
11294 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
11295 </pre></p>
11296
11297 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
11298 devices. See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
11299 details on the build. If you do not want all three images, trim the
11300 make line. Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
11301 virtualbox specific. It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
11302 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment. You might need
11303 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
11304 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
11305
11306 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
11307 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
11308 the preseed values:</p>
11309
11310 <p><pre>
11311 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
11312 </pre></p>
11313
11314 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
11315 it still work.</p>
11316
11317 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
11318 systemd as the boot system. It will become the default for Linux in
11319 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox. I did
11320 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
11321 during boot when using systemd. I suspect there are other problems
11322 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
11323 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
11324
11325 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
11326 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
11327 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
11328 irc.debian.org)</a> and
11329 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
11330 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
11331
11332 </div>
11333 <div class="tags">
11334
11335
11336 Tags: <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>.
11337
11338
11339 </div>
11340 </div>
11341 <div class="padding"></div>
11342
11343 <div class="entry">
11344 <div class="title">
11345 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
11346 </div>
11347 <div class="date">
11348 9th April 2014
11349 </div>
11350 <div class="body">
11351 <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
11352 solution for use at home. My requirements are simple, it must be
11353 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
11354 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
11355 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
11356 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
11357 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
11358 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space. On top
11359 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
11360 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage. But
11361 I never found time to implement such system. But the last few weeks I
11362 have looked at a system called
11363 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
11364 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
11365
11366 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
11367 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
11368 Google Drive or OpenStack API. There are heaps of such storage
11369 providers. S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
11370 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server. S3QL
11371 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
11372 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
11373 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
11374 while the content is stored in the cloud as well. This allow me to
11375 have a backup that should survive fire. The file system can not be
11376 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
11377 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
11378 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
11379
11380 <p>It is simple to use. I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
11381 package is included already. So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
11382 install s3ql</tt>. Next, pick a storage provider. I ended up picking
11383 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
11384 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
11385 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
11386 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
11387 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
11388 in Iceland. Another nice recipe is available from the article
11389 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
11390 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
11391 Admin magazine. When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
11392 the API key needed to connect to the storage API. With Greencloud,
11393 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
11394 account.</p>
11395
11396 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
11397 system. First, create a new bucket in the cloud. This bucket is the
11398 file system storage area. I picked a bucket name reflecting the
11399 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
11400 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below. In addition, one need
11401 the API login and password, and a locally created password. Store it
11402 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
11403
11404 <p><blockquote><pre>
11405 [s3c]
11406 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
11407 backend-login: API-login
11408 backend-password: API-password
11409 fs-passphrase: local-password
11410 </pre></blockquote></p>
11411
11412 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
11413 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
11414 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
11415 details and password to create it:</p>
11416
11417 <p><blockquote><pre>
11418 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
11419 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11420 --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
11421 Enter backend login:
11422 Enter backend password:
11423 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
11424 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
11425 Enter encryption password:
11426 Confirm encryption password:
11427 Generating random encryption key...
11428 Creating metadata tables...
11429 Dumping metadata...
11430 ..objects..
11431 ..blocks..
11432 ..inodes..
11433 ..inode_blocks..
11434 ..symlink_targets..
11435 ..names..
11436 ..contents..
11437 ..ext_attributes..
11438 Compressing and uploading metadata...
11439 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
11440 # </pre></blockquote></p>
11441
11442 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
11443
11444 <p><blockquote><pre>
11445 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11446 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
11447 Using 4 upload threads.
11448 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
11449 Reading metadata...
11450 ..objects..
11451 ..blocks..
11452 ..inodes..
11453 ..inode_blocks..
11454 ..symlink_targets..
11455 ..names..
11456 ..contents..
11457 ..ext_attributes..
11458 Mounting filesystem...
11459 # df -h /s3ql
11460 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
11461 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name 1.0T 0 1.0T 0% /s3ql
11462 #
11463 </pre></blockquote></p>
11464
11465 <p>The file system is now ready for use. I use rsync to store my
11466 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
11467 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
11468 running rsync. To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
11469 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
11470 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
11471
11472 <p><blockquote><pre>
11473 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
11474 #
11475 </pre></blockquote></p>
11476
11477 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
11478 correct any problems detected. This can be used if the local server
11479 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
11480 mounted" flag. This is what it look like when processing a working
11481 file system:</p>
11482
11483 <p><blockquote><pre>
11484 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
11485 Using cached metadata.
11486 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
11487 Checking DB integrity...
11488 Creating temporary extra indices...
11489 Checking lost+found...
11490 Checking cached objects...
11491 Checking names (refcounts)...
11492 Checking contents (names)...
11493 Checking contents (inodes)...
11494 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
11495 Checking objects (reference counts)...
11496 Checking objects (backend)...
11497 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
11498 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
11499 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
11500 Checking objects (sizes)...
11501 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
11502 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
11503 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
11504 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
11505 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
11506 Checking inodes (sizes)...
11507 Checking extended attributes (names)...
11508 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
11509 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
11510 Checking directory reachability...
11511 Checking unix conventions...
11512 Checking referential integrity...
11513 Dropping temporary indices...
11514 Backing up old metadata...
11515 Dumping metadata...
11516 ..objects..
11517 ..blocks..
11518 ..inodes..
11519 ..inode_blocks..
11520 ..symlink_targets..
11521 ..names..
11522 ..contents..
11523 ..ext_attributes..
11524 Compressing and uploading metadata...
11525 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
11526 #
11527 </pre></blockquote></p>
11528
11529 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
11530 quick, about the same speed as local file access. Uploading large
11531 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
11532 house. Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
11533 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
11534 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
11535 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>. So for me, the bottleneck is my
11536 network, not the file system code. I do not know what a good cache
11537 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
11538 working set.</p>
11539
11540 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
11541 time. If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
11542 busy:</p>
11543
11544 <p><blockquote><pre>
11545 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11546 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
11547 Using 8 upload threads.
11548 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
11549 #
11550 </pre></blockquote></p>
11551
11552 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
11553 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default. To ensure the
11554 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
11555 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
11556 s3qlctrl:
11557
11558 <p><blockquote><pre>
11559 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
11560 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
11561 #
11562 </pre></blockquote></p>
11563
11564 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
11565 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
11566 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
11567 a report:</p>
11568
11569 <p><blockquote><pre>
11570 # s3qlstat /s3ql
11571 Directory entries: 9141
11572 Inodes: 9143
11573 Data blocks: 8851
11574 Total data size: 22049.38 MB
11575 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
11576 After compression: 21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
11577 Database size: 2.39 MB (uncompressed)
11578 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
11579 #
11580 </pre></blockquote></p>
11581
11582 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
11583 storage. I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
11584 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
11585 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
11586 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
11587 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
11588 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>. The latter even
11589 accept payment in Bitcoin. Pick one that suit your need. Some of
11590 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
11591 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
11592 best.</p>
11593
11594 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
11595 and posters discussing the S3QL file system. There are several, which
11596 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
11597 science community and increased my confidence in using it. One nice
11598 poster is titled
11599 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
11600 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
11601 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
11602 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
11603 and Pamela Smith. Please have a look.</p>
11604
11605 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
11606 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
11607 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
11608 it come to locking and umask handling etc). Running
11609 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
11610 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
11611 no error was found. So the file system can be used for home
11612 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
11613
11614 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
11615 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
11616 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
11617 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client. It have
11618 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
11619 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
11620 only read from it.</p>
11621
11622 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11623 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11624 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11625
11626 </div>
11627 <div class="tags">
11628
11629
11630 Tags: <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>.
11631
11632
11633 </div>
11634 </div>
11635 <div class="padding"></div>
11636
11637 <div class="entry">
11638 <div class="title">
11639 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
11640 </div>
11641 <div class="date">
11642 1st April 2014
11643 </div>
11644 <div class="body">
11645 <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
11646 2014-04-08, in 7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running
11647 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
11648 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
11649 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
11650 new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
11651 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
11652 are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve
11653 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
11654 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
11655 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
11656 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
11657 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
11658
11659 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
11660 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
11661 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
11662 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
11663 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
11664 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
11665 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is
11666 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
11667 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
11668 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
11669 Linux.</p>
11670
11671 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
11672 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
11673 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
11674 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
11675 click directly from the Internet. Check out the
11676 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
11677 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
11678 Windows before metro).</p>
11679
11680 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
11681 operating systems. I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
11682 virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
11683 fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application
11684 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
11685 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
11686 the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software.
11687 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
11688 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
11689 to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your
11690 old Windows binaries, check it out by
11691 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
11692 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
11693 image.</p>
11694
11695 </div>
11696 <div class="tags">
11697
11698
11699 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>.
11700
11701
11702 </div>
11703 </div>
11704 <div class="padding"></div>
11705
11706 <div class="entry">
11707 <div class="title">
11708 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
11709 </div>
11710 <div class="date">
11711 30th March 2014
11712 </div>
11713 <div class="body">
11714 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
11715 keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
11716 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
11717 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
11718 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
11719
11720 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11721
11722 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
11723 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
11724 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
11725 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
11726 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
11727
11728 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
11729 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
11730 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
11731
11732 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
11733 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
11734 hunger.</p>
11735
11736 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11737 project?</strong></p>
11738
11739 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
11740 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
11741 started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
11742 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
11743 change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
11744 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
11745 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
11746 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
11747 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
11748 running. I just loved it.</p>
11749
11750 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11751 Edu?</strong></p>
11752
11753 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
11754 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
11755 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
11756 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
11757 be made of steel.</p>
11758
11759 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11760 Edu?</strong></p>
11761
11762 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
11763
11764 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
11765 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
11766 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
11767 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
11768 or dropped.</p>
11769
11770 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
11771 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
11772 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
11773 discourage many people too.</p>
11774
11775 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11776
11777 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
11778 Virtualbox.</p>
11779
11780
11781 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11782 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11783
11784 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
11785 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
11786 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
11787 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
11788 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
11789 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
11790 different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
11791 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
11792 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
11793
11794 </div>
11795 <div class="tags">
11796
11797
11798 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11799
11800
11801 </div>
11802 </div>
11803 <div class="padding"></div>
11804
11805 <div class="entry">
11806 <div class="title">
11807 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
11808 </div>
11809 <div class="date">
11810 25th March 2014
11811 </div>
11812 <div class="body">
11813 <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
11814 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
11815 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
11816 changed since it was created? Or, did you ever need to document that
11817 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
11818 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
11819 was received? The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
11820 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
11821 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
11822
11823 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
11824 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
11825 looked a given way. Such
11826 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
11827 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
11828 called a
11829 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
11830 timestamping service</a>. <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
11831 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
11832 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
11833 3161</a>. The mechanism is simple. Create a hash of the file in
11834 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
11835 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
11836 signed hash + timestamp. Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
11837 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
11838 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
11839 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
11840 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
11841 There are several commercial services around providing such
11842 timestamping. A quick search for
11843 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
11844 service</a>" pointed me to at least
11845 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
11846 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
11847 Vadis</a>,
11848 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
11849 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
11850 Trust Finder</a>. The system work as long as the private key of the
11851 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
11852
11853 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
11854 timestamp services available for everyone. I've been looking for one
11855 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
11856 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
11857 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
11858 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
11859 blog by David Müller</a>. I then found
11860 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
11861 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
11862 Greifswald.</p>
11863
11864 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
11865 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service. See
11866 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details. The
11867 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
11868 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
11869
11870 <p><blockquote><pre>
11871 #!/bin/sh
11872 set -e
11873 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
11874 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
11875 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
11876 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
11877 cafile=chain.txt
11878 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
11879 wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
11880 fi
11881 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
11882 | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
11883 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
11884 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
11885 base64 < "$resfile"
11886 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
11887 </pre></blockquote></p>
11888
11889 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
11890 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
11891 about the signature to STDERR. Note that due to
11892 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
11893 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
11894 and remove the last line. Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
11895 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
11896 changed.</p>
11897
11898 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
11899 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
11900 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
11901 to set up?</p>
11902
11903 </div>
11904 <div class="tags">
11905
11906
11907 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>.
11908
11909
11910 </div>
11911 </div>
11912 <div class="padding"></div>
11913
11914 <div class="entry">
11915 <div class="title">
11916 <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>
11917 </div>
11918 <div class="date">
11919 21st March 2014
11920 </div>
11921 <div class="body">
11922 <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
11923 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
11924 movie is not straight forward. My preferred method at the moment is
11925 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
11926 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file. This way the
11927 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
11928 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
11929
11930 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
11931 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them). I've also
11932 tried using
11933 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
11934 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
11935 and program
11936 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
11937 written by Bastian Blank. It is
11938 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
11939 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
11940 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
11941 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
11942 and only read those blocks from the DVD. This work surprisingly well,
11943 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
11944 this method.</p>
11945
11946 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
11947 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection. The most common
11948 problem is
11949 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
11950 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
11951 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
11952 players to fail too). A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
11953 DVD structures, as the python library
11954 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
11955 there is a overlap between objects</a>. An equally rare problem claim
11956 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
11957 value is out of range</a>. No idea what is going on there. I wish I
11958 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
11959 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
11960
11961 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
11962 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
11963
11964 </div>
11965 <div class="tags">
11966
11967
11968 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>.
11969
11970
11971 </div>
11972 </div>
11973 <div class="padding"></div>
11974
11975 <div class="entry">
11976 <div class="title">
11977 <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>
11978 </div>
11979 <div class="date">
11980 14th March 2014
11981 </div>
11982 <div class="body">
11983 <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
11984 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
11985 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
11986 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
11987 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
11988 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
11989 release (0.2).</p>
11990
11991 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
11992 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
11993 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
11994 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
11995 file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
11996 where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one,
11997 the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own
11998 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
11999 and build using
12000 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
12001 with a user with sudo access to become root:
12002
12003 <pre>
12004 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
12005 freedom-maker
12006 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
12007 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
12008 u-boot-tools
12009 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
12010 </pre>
12011
12012 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
12013 devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
12014 want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to <a
12015 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
12016 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
12017 kpartx call.</p>
12018
12019 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
12020 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
12021 the preseed values:</p>
12022
12023 <pre>
12024 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
12025 </pre>
12026
12027 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
12028 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
12029 currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
12030 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
12031 installation will get the installation going. This affect all
12032 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
12033
12034 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
12035 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
12036 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
12037 irc.debian.org)</a> and
12038 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
12039 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
12040
12041 </div>
12042 <div class="tags">
12043
12044
12045 Tags: <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>.
12046
12047
12048 </div>
12049 </div>
12050 <div class="padding"></div>
12051
12052 <div class="entry">
12053 <div class="title">
12054 <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>
12055 </div>
12056 <div class="date">
12057 12th March 2014
12058 </div>
12059 <div class="body">
12060 <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
12061 storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
12062 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
12063 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
12064 the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
12065 document this better when one of the customers of
12066 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
12067 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
12068 get this working are the following:</p>
12069
12070 <p><ol>
12071
12072 <li>Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
12073 example host here.</li>
12074
12075 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
12076 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
12077
12078 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
12079 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
12080
12081 </ol></p>
12082
12083 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
12084 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
12085 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
12086 started).</p>
12087
12088 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
12089 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
12090
12091 <p><blockquote><pre>
12092 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
12093 Export list for nas-server:
12094 /storage 10.0.0.0/8
12095 root@tjener:~#
12096 </pre></blockquote></p>
12097
12098 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
12099 /storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
12100 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
12101 NFS access.</p>
12102
12103 <p>The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
12104 because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
12105 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
12106
12107 <p><blockquote><pre>
12108 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12109 </pre></blockquote></p>
12110
12111 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
12112 bottom of the document. The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
12113 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
12114 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
12115
12116 <p><blockquote><pre>
12117 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12118 objectClass: automount
12119 cn: nas-server
12120 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12121
12122 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12123 objectClass: top
12124 objectClass: automountMap
12125 ou: auto.nas-server
12126
12127 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12128 objectClass: automount
12129 cn: /
12130 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
12131 </pre></blockquote></p>
12132
12133 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
12134 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
12135 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
12136
12137 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
12138 the storage server directly by just visiting the
12139 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
12140 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
12141
12142 </div>
12143 <div class="tags">
12144
12145
12146 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12147
12148
12149 </div>
12150 </div>
12151 <div class="padding"></div>
12152
12153 <div class="entry">
12154 <div class="title">
12155 <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>
12156 </div>
12157 <div class="date">
12158 22nd February 2014
12159 </div>
12160 <div class="body">
12161 <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
12162 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
12163 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>. I called the project
12164 ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the
12165 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
12166 repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
12167 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
12168 proper home since then.</p>
12169
12170 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
12171 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
12172 a proper source control system. I applied for a project on
12173 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
12174 to follow up on it. Until today. :)</p>
12175
12176 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
12177 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
12178 history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported
12179 them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not
12180 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
12181 release and call it 1.0. Visit the new project home on
12182 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
12183 if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into
12184 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
12185
12186 </div>
12187 <div class="tags">
12188
12189
12190 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12191
12192
12193 </div>
12194 </div>
12195 <div class="padding"></div>
12196
12197 <div class="entry">
12198 <div class="title">
12199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
12200 </div>
12201 <div class="date">
12202 3rd February 2014
12203 </div>
12204 <div class="body">
12205 <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
12206 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
12207 boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
12208 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
12209 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
12210 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
12211 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
12212 <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>,
12213 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
12214
12215 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
12216 password) was to get the network operational. I followed
12217 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
12218 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
12219 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
12220 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
12221
12222 <p><blockquote><pre>
12223 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
12224 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
12225 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
12226 dhclient /dev/eth0
12227 </pre></blockquote></p>
12228
12229 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
12230 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
12231 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
12232
12233 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
12234 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
12235 set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
12236 compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
12237 side.</p>
12238
12239 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
12240 stuff:</p>
12241
12242 <p><blockquote><pre>
12243 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
12244 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
12245 EOF
12246 apt-get update
12247 apt-get dist-upgrade
12248 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
12249 sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
12250 update-alternatives --config runsystem
12251 </pre></blockquote></p>
12252
12253 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
12254 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
12255 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
12256 'reboot' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
12257 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
12258 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
12259 start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
12260 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
12261 ssh instead.
12262
12263 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
12264 fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
12265 figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
12266 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
12267 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
12268 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
12269
12270 <p><blockquote><pre>
12271 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
12272 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
12273 EOF
12274 </pre></blockquote></p>
12275
12276 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
12277 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
12278 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
12279 BTS. This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
12280
12281 <p><blockquote><pre>
12282 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
12283 i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
12284 i gdb - GNU Debugger
12285 i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
12286 i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
12287 i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
12288 i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
12289 i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
12290 i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
12291 i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
12292 i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
12293 i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
12294 i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
12295 i xorg - X.Org X Window System
12296 i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
12297 i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
12298 #
12299 </pre></blockquote></p>
12300
12301 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
12302 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
12303 the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
12304 command line stuff.<p>
12305
12306 </div>
12307 <div class="tags">
12308
12309
12310 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>.
12311
12312
12313 </div>
12314 </div>
12315 <div class="padding"></div>
12316
12317 <div class="entry">
12318 <div class="title">
12319 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
12320 </div>
12321 <div class="date">
12322 29th January 2014
12323 </div>
12324 <div class="body">
12325 <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
12326 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
12327 central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
12328 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least
12329 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
12330 details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is
12331 investigated in
12332 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
12333 from December 2013, in the article
12334 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
12335 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
12336 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
12337 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They
12338 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
12339 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
12340 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
12341 money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
12342
12343 <p><blockquote>
12344 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
12345 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
12346 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
12347 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
12348 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
12349 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
12350 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
12351 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
12352 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
12353 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
12354 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
12355 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
12356
12357 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
12358 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
12359 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
12360 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
12361 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
12362 stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve
12363 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
12364 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
12365 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
12366 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
12367 </blockquote><p>
12368
12369 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
12370 transaction log. The 2011 paper
12371 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
12372 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
12373 summarized like this:</p>
12374
12375 <p><blockquote>
12376 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
12377 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
12378 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
12379 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
12380 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
12381 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
12382 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
12383 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
12384 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
12385 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
12386 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
12387 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
12388 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
12389 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
12390 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
12391 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
12392 </blockquote></p>
12393
12394 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
12395 is anonymous. It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use
12396 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
12397 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
12398
12399 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12400 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12401 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12402
12403 </div>
12404 <div class="tags">
12405
12406
12407 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>.
12408
12409
12410 </div>
12411 </div>
12412 <div class="padding"></div>
12413
12414 <div class="entry">
12415 <div class="title">
12416 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
12417 </div>
12418 <div class="date">
12419 14th January 2014
12420 </div>
12421 <div class="body">
12422 <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
12423 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
12424 analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
12425 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
12426 the source. The company behind it provide
12427 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
12428 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
12429 already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
12430 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
12431 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
12432 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
12433 projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
12434 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
12435 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
12436 checking of the chrpath project</a>. It was
12437 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
12438 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
12439 error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
12440 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
12441 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
12442 the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
12443 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
12444 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
12445 publish a new release. These are the release notes:</p>
12446
12447 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
12448
12449 <ul>
12450
12451 <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
12452 <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
12453 <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
12454
12455 </ul>
12456
12457 <p>You can
12458 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
12459 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
12460 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
12461 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
12462 include a test suite check.</p>
12463
12464 </div>
12465 <div class="tags">
12466
12467
12468 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>.
12469
12470
12471 </div>
12472 </div>
12473 <div class="padding"></div>
12474
12475 <div class="entry">
12476 <div class="title">
12477 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
12478 </div>
12479 <div class="date">
12480 25th December 2013
12481 </div>
12482 <div class="body">
12483 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12484 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
12485 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
12486 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
12487 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
12488 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
12489 George</a>.</p>
12490
12491 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
12492
12493 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12494
12495 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
12496 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
12497 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
12498 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
12499 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
12500 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
12501
12502 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
12503 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
12504 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
12505 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
12506 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
12507 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
12508 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
12509 to help building another school's informational education concept from
12510 scratch.</p>
12511
12512 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
12513 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
12514 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
12515
12516 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
12517 and cycling.</p>
12518
12519 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12520 project?</strong></p>
12521
12522 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
12523 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
12524 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
12525 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
12526 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
12527 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
12528
12529 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
12530 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
12531 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
12532 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
12533 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
12534 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
12535 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
12536 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
12537 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
12538
12539 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
12540 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
12541 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
12542 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
12543
12544 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12545 Edu?</strong></p>
12546
12547 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
12548 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
12549 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
12550 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
12551 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
12552 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
12553 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
12554 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
12555 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
12556 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
12557 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
12558 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
12559 that it rocks!</p>
12560
12561 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
12562 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
12563 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
12564 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
12565 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
12566 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
12567 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
12568
12569 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12570 Edu?</strong></p>
12571
12572 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
12573 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
12574 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
12575 can list a few points about that:</p>
12576
12577 <ul>
12578
12579 <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
12580 <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
12581 <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
12582
12583 </ul>
12584
12585 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
12586
12587 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12588
12589 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
12590 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
12591 year.</p>
12592
12593 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
12594 run text tools. I use
12595 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
12596 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
12597 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
12598 based full-featured student management software with the two),
12599 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
12600 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
12601 coloured world called the WWW, I use
12602 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
12603 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
12604 e-mail.</p>
12605
12606 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
12607 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
12608 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
12609 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
12610 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
12611 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
12612 Facebook now ;).</p>
12613
12614 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12615 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12616
12617 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
12618 side is what I have experienced.</p>
12619
12620 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
12621 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
12622 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
12623 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
12624 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
12625 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
12626 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
12627 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
12628 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
12629 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
12630 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
12631 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
12632 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
12633 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
12634 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
12635 plain criminal.</p>
12636
12637 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
12638 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
12639 founded an association named
12640 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
12641 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
12642 area of free and open source software, for example the
12643 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
12644 Teckids and are the youth programme of
12645 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
12646 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
12647 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
12648 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
12649 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
12650 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
12651
12652 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
12653 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
12654 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
12655 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
12656 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
12657 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
12658 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
12659 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
12660 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
12661 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
12662 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
12663 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
12664
12665 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
12666 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
12667 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
12668 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
12669
12670 <!--
12671
12672 > * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
12673
12674 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
12675 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
12676
12677 <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
12678 free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
12679 of the decision makers above;
12680 <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
12681 knowledge about free software
12682
12683 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
12684
12685 -->
12686
12687 </div>
12688 <div class="tags">
12689
12690
12691 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12692
12693
12694 </div>
12695 </div>
12696 <div class="padding"></div>
12697
12698 <div class="entry">
12699 <div class="title">
12700 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
12701 </div>
12702 <div class="date">
12703 6th December 2013
12704 </div>
12705 <div class="body">
12706 <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
12707 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12708 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
12709 had a new school administrator show up on
12710 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
12711 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
12712 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
12713 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
12714 Germany a few years ago.</p>
12715
12716 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12717
12718 <p>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
12719 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
12720 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
12721 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
12722
12723 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
12724 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
12725 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
12726 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
12727 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
12728 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
12729 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
12730 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
12731 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
12732
12733 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12734 project?</strong></p>
12735
12736 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
12737 coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
12738 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
12739 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
12740
12741 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12742 Edu?</strong></p>
12743
12744 <ul>
12745 <li>Quick installation,</li>
12746 <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
12747 <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
12748 <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
12749 single company,</li>
12750 <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
12751 experience and problem solutions.</li>
12752 </ul>
12753
12754 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12755 Edu?</strong></p>
12756
12757 <ul>
12758 <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
12759 the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
12760 a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
12761 working again reliably.
12762
12763 <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
12764 little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
12765 similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
12766 as their base.
12767
12768 <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
12769 configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
12770 not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
12771 configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
12772 and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
12773 network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
12774
12775 <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
12776 contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
12777 distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
12778 Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
12779 future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
12780 schemes.</li>
12781
12782 <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
12783 compared to Debian.</li>
12784
12785 </ul>
12786
12787 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
12788 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
12789 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
12790 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
12791
12792 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12793
12794 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
12795 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
12796 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
12797 programming languages for teaching.</p>
12798
12799 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12800 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12801
12802 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
12803
12804 <ul>
12805
12806 <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
12807 teaching and learning.</li>
12808
12809 <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
12810 home, and at their working place without running into license or
12811 conversion problems.</li>
12812
12813 <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
12814 than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
12815 customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
12816 science, not products.</li>
12817
12818 <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
12819 would you need proprietary software for?</li>
12820
12821 </ul>
12822
12823 </div>
12824 <div class="tags">
12825
12826
12827 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12828
12829
12830 </div>
12831 </div>
12832 <div class="padding"></div>
12833
12834 <div class="entry">
12835 <div class="title">
12836 <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>
12837 </div>
12838 <div class="date">
12839 30th November 2013
12840 </div>
12841 <div class="body">
12842 <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
12843 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
12844 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
12845 experiment with interesting network technology, the
12846 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
12847 might be project for you. 39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
12848 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
12849 wireless community network. The work is inspired by
12850 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
12851 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
12852 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
12853 and other successful mesh networks around the globe. Two days ago we
12854 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
12855 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
12856 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
12857 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
12858 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
12859 coordinate the work. See also the NUUG blog post
12860 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
12861 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
12862
12863 </div>
12864 <div class="tags">
12865
12866
12867 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>.
12868
12869
12870 </div>
12871 </div>
12872 <div class="padding"></div>
12873
12874 <div class="entry">
12875 <div class="title">
12876 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
12877 </div>
12878 <div class="date">
12879 24th November 2013
12880 </div>
12881 <div class="body">
12882 <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
12883 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
12884 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
12885 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
12886 compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of
12887 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
12888 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
12889 is working on. I checked the
12890 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
12891 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
12892 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
12893 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
12894 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
12895 These are the release notes:</p>
12896
12897 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
12898
12899 <ul>
12900
12901 <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
12902 with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
12903 up.</li>
12904
12905 <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
12906
12907 <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
12908 Matthias Klose.</li>
12909
12910 <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
12911 Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
12912
12913 <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
12914 .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in
12915 Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
12916
12917 </ul>
12918
12919 <p>You can
12920 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
12921 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
12922 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
12923 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
12924 include a testsuite check.</p>
12925
12926 </div>
12927 <div class="tags">
12928
12929
12930 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>.
12931
12932
12933 </div>
12934 </div>
12935 <div class="padding"></div>
12936
12937 <div class="entry">
12938 <div class="title">
12939 <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>
12940 </div>
12941 <div class="date">
12942 21st November 2013
12943 </div>
12944 <div class="body">
12945 <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular. The most
12946 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
12947 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
12948 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
12949 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue. I am sure it
12950 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
12951 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
12952 too. The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous. To have
12953 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
12954 TED talk
12955 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
12956 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
12957 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
12958
12959 <blockquote>
12960
12961 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
12962 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
12963 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
12964 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
12965 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
12966 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
12967 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
12968 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
12969 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
12970 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
12971 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
12972
12973 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
12974 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
12975 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
12976
12977 </blockquote>
12978
12979 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
12980 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
12981 both the government and others use of drones. For such control to be
12982 effective, everyone must be able to do it. What should such beacon
12983 contain? At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
12984 location. Probably also the origin and target position of the current
12985 flight. And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
12986 the drone in a central database tracking their movement. Robots
12987 should not have privacy. It is people who need privacy.</p>
12988
12989 </div>
12990 <div class="tags">
12991
12992
12993 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>.
12994
12995
12996 </div>
12997 </div>
12998 <div class="padding"></div>
12999
13000 <div class="entry">
13001 <div class="title">
13002 <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>
13003 </div>
13004 <div class="date">
13005 13th November 2013
13006 </div>
13007 <div class="body">
13008 <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
13009 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
13010 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
13011 Oslo</a>. The workshop to help people get started will take place
13012 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
13013 people joining forces to make this happen. We have
13014 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
13015 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
13016 a connected mesh spread across Oslo. If this sound interesting to
13017 you, please join us at the workshop. If you are too impatient to wait
13018 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
13019 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
13020 right away. :)</p>
13021
13022 </div>
13023 <div class="tags">
13024
13025
13026 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>.
13027
13028
13029 </div>
13030 </div>
13031 <div class="padding"></div>
13032
13033 <div class="entry">
13034 <div class="title">
13035 <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>
13036 </div>
13037 <div class="date">
13038 10th November 2013
13039 </div>
13040 <div class="body">
13041 <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
13042 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
13043 bought arrived on Friday. Here are my notes on how to set up the
13044 MR3040 as a mesh node using
13045 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
13046
13047 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
13048 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
13049 and downloaded
13050 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
13051 recommended firmware image</a>
13052 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
13053 uploaded it into the original web interface. The flashing went fine,
13054 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port. After
13055 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
13056 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
13057
13058 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
13059 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
13060 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
13061 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
13062 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
13063 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>. A small snag was the fact that the
13064 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
13065 should. The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
13066 dependency crc16 was not already loaded. I
13067 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
13068 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon. But the problem
13069 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
13070 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
13071
13072 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/. I did not bridge
13073 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
13074 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
13075 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
13076 them:</p>
13077
13078 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
13079
13080 <pre>
13081
13082 config interface 'loopback'
13083 option ifname 'lo'
13084 option proto 'static'
13085 option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
13086 option netmask '255.0.0.0'
13087
13088 config globals 'globals'
13089 option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
13090
13091 config interface 'lan'
13092 option ifname 'eth0'
13093 option type 'bridge'
13094 option proto 'dhcp'
13095 option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
13096 option netmask '255.255.255.0'
13097 option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
13098 option ip6assign '60'
13099
13100 config interface 'mesh'
13101 option ifname 'adhoc0'
13102 option mtu '1528'
13103 option proto 'batadv'
13104 option mesh 'bat0'
13105 </pre>
13106
13107 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
13108 <pre>
13109
13110 config wifi-device 'radio0'
13111 option type 'mac80211'
13112 option channel '11'
13113 option hwmode '11ng'
13114 option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
13115 option htmode 'HT20'
13116 list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
13117 list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
13118 list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
13119 list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
13120 option disabled '0'
13121
13122 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
13123 option device 'radio0'
13124 option ifname 'adhoc0'
13125 option network 'mesh'
13126 option encryption 'none'
13127 option mode 'adhoc'
13128 option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
13129 option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
13130 </pre>
13131 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
13132 <pre>
13133
13134 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
13135 option interfaces 'adhoc0'
13136 option 'aggregated_ogms'
13137 option 'ap_isolation'
13138 option 'bonding'
13139 option 'fragmentation'
13140 option 'gw_bandwidth'
13141 option 'gw_mode'
13142 option 'gw_sel_class'
13143 option 'log_level'
13144 option 'orig_interval'
13145 option 'vis_mode'
13146 option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
13147 option 'distributed_arp_table'
13148 option 'network_coding'
13149 option 'hop_penalty'
13150
13151 # yet another batX instance
13152 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
13153 # option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
13154 </pre>
13155
13156 <p>The mesh node is now operational. I have yet to test its range,
13157 but I hope it is good. I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
13158 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
13159
13160 </div>
13161 <div class="tags">
13162
13163
13164 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>.
13165
13166
13167 </div>
13168 </div>
13169 <div class="padding"></div>
13170
13171 <div class="entry">
13172 <div class="title">
13173 <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>
13174 </div>
13175 <div class="date">
13176 2nd November 2013
13177 </div>
13178 <div class="body">
13179 <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
13180 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
13181 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
13182 init.d scripts at all. Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
13183 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
13184
13185 <p><pre>
13186 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
13187 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
13188 # Provides: rsyslog
13189 # Required-Start: $remote_fs $time
13190 # Required-Stop: umountnfs $time
13191 # X-Stop-After: sendsigs
13192 # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
13193 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6
13194 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
13195 # Description: Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
13196 # It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
13197 # used as a drop-in replacement.
13198 ### END INIT INFO
13199 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
13200 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
13201 </pre></p>
13202
13203 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
13204 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
13205 info/comments.</p>
13206
13207 <p>How to do this, you ask? Well, one create a new script
13208 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
13209
13210 <p><pre>
13211 #!/bin/sh
13212
13213 # Define LSB log_* functions.
13214 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
13215 # and status_of_proc is working.
13216 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
13217
13218 #
13219 # Function that starts the daemon/service
13220
13221 #
13222 do_start()
13223 {
13224 # Return
13225 # 0 if daemon has been started
13226 # 1 if daemon was already running
13227 # 2 if daemon could not be started
13228 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
13229 || return 1
13230 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
13231 $DAEMON_ARGS \
13232 || return 2
13233 # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
13234 # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
13235 # on this one. As a last resort, sleep for some time.
13236 }
13237
13238 #
13239 # Function that stops the daemon/service
13240 #
13241 do_stop()
13242 {
13243 # Return
13244 # 0 if daemon has been stopped
13245 # 1 if daemon was already stopped
13246 # 2 if daemon could not be stopped
13247 # other if a failure occurred
13248 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
13249 RETVAL="$?"
13250 [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
13251 # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
13252 # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
13253 # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
13254 # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
13255 # needed by services started subsequently. A last resort is to
13256 # sleep for some time.
13257 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
13258 [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
13259 # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
13260 rm -f $PIDFILE
13261 return "$RETVAL"
13262 }
13263
13264 #
13265 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
13266 #
13267 do_reload() {
13268 #
13269 # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
13270 # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
13271 # then implement that here.
13272 #
13273 start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
13274 return 0
13275 }
13276
13277 SCRIPTNAME=$1
13278 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
13279 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
13280 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
13281 script="$1"
13282 shift
13283 . $script
13284 else
13285 exit 0
13286 fi
13287
13288 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
13289 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
13290
13291 # Exit if the package is not installed
13292 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
13293
13294 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
13295 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
13296
13297 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
13298 . /lib/init/vars.sh
13299
13300 case "$1" in
13301 start)
13302 [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
13303 do_start
13304 case "$?" in
13305 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
13306 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
13307 esac
13308 ;;
13309 stop)
13310 [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
13311 do_stop
13312 case "$?" in
13313 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
13314 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
13315 esac
13316 ;;
13317 status)
13318 status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
13319 ;;
13320 #reload|force-reload)
13321 #
13322 # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
13323 # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
13324 #
13325 #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
13326 #do_reload
13327 #log_end_msg $?
13328 #;;
13329 restart|force-reload)
13330 #
13331 # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
13332 # 'force-reload' alias
13333 #
13334 log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
13335 do_stop
13336 case "$?" in
13337 0|1)
13338 do_start
13339 case "$?" in
13340 0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
13341 1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
13342 *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
13343 esac
13344 ;;
13345 *)
13346 # Failed to stop
13347 log_end_msg 1
13348 ;;
13349 esac
13350 ;;
13351 *)
13352 echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
13353 exit 3
13354 ;;
13355 esac
13356
13357 :
13358 </pre></p>
13359
13360 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
13361 lot. I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
13362 work out of the box, but you get the idea. I did not try very hard to
13363 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
13364
13365 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
13366 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
13367 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
13368 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially. The boot
13369 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
13370
13371 </div>
13372 <div class="tags">
13373
13374
13375 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>.
13376
13377
13378 </div>
13379 </div>
13380 <div class="padding"></div>
13381
13382 <div class="entry">
13383 <div class="title">
13384 <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>
13385 </div>
13386 <div class="date">
13387 1st November 2013
13388 </div>
13389 <div class="body">
13390 <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
13391 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
13392 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
13393 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
13394 missing in Debian. The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
13395 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
13396 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
13397 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
13398 repository to get a package I could use. I would very much like
13399 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
13400 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
13401 NEW. I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
13402
13403 <p>The source is now available from
13404 <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>
13405
13406 </div>
13407 <div class="tags">
13408
13409
13410 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13411
13412
13413 </div>
13414 </div>
13415 <div class="padding"></div>
13416
13417 <div class="entry">
13418 <div class="title">
13419 <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>
13420 </div>
13421 <div class="date">
13422 27th October 2013
13423 </div>
13424 <div class="body">
13425 <p>The
13426 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
13427 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
13428 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
13429 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
13430 stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
13431 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
13432 of a plan to simplify the build system for
13433 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
13434 project</a>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
13435 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
13436 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
13437 Raspberry Pi.</p>
13438
13439 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
13440 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
13441 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
13442 Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
13443 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
13444 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
13445 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>. First, the
13446 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
13447 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
13448 generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
13449 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
13450 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
13451 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
13452 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
13453 partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a <tt>--variant
13454 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
13455 Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
13456 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
13457 as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
13458 most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
13459 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
13460 available from
13461 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
13462 upstream project page</a>.</p>
13463
13464 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
13465 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
13466 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
13467 list:</p>
13468
13469 <p><pre>
13470 #!/bin/sh
13471 set -e # Exit on first error
13472 rootdir="$1"
13473 cd "$rootdir"
13474 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
13475 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
13476 EOF
13477 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
13478 # install a kernel somewhere too.
13479 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
13480 -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
13481 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
13482 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
13483 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
13484 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
13485 </pre></p>
13486
13487 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
13488 to build the image:</p>
13489
13490 <pre>
13491 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
13492 --variant minbase \
13493 --arch armel \
13494 --distribution jessie \
13495 --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
13496 --image test.img \
13497 --size 600M \
13498 --bootsize 64M \
13499 --boottype vfat \
13500 --log-level debug \
13501 --verbose \
13502 --no-kernel \
13503 --no-extlinux \
13504 --root-password raspberry \
13505 --hostname raspberrypi \
13506 --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
13507 --customize `pwd`/customize \
13508 --package netbase \
13509 --package git-core \
13510 --package binutils \
13511 --package ca-certificates \
13512 --package wget \
13513 --package kmod
13514 </pre></p>
13515
13516 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
13517 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
13518 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
13519 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
13520 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
13521 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
13522 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
13523
13524 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
13525 probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
13526 build dependency list.</p>
13527
13528 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
13529 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
13530 optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
13531 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
13532
13533 </div>
13534 <div class="tags">
13535
13536
13537 Tags: <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>.
13538
13539
13540 </div>
13541 </div>
13542 <div class="padding"></div>
13543
13544 <div class="entry">
13545 <div class="title">
13546 <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>
13547 </div>
13548 <div class="date">
13549 21st October 2013
13550 </div>
13551 <div class="body">
13552 <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
13553 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
13554 batman-adv mesh technology</a>. I want to gain some experience to see
13555 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
13556 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
13557 mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer 2
13558 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
13559 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
13560
13561 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
13562 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
13563 instead, I started playing with a
13564 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
13565 get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
13566 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
13567 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
13568 network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
13569 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
13570 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
13571 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
13572 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
13573 phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
13574 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
13575 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
13576 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
13577 every client on the local network.</p>
13578
13579 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
13580 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
13581 and a script
13582 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
13583 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and
13584 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
13585 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
13586 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as
13587 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
13588 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
13589 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
13590 support.</p>
13591
13592 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
13593 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
13594
13595 <p><pre>
13596 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
13597 https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
13598 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
13599 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
13600 %
13601 </pre></p>
13602
13603 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
13604 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
13605 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
13606 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
13607 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
13608 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
13609
13610 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
13611 everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
13612 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
13613
13614 <p><table>
13615
13616 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
13617 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
13618 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
13619 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
13620 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
13621 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
13622
13623 </table></p>
13624
13625 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
13626 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
13627 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
13628 play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
13629 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
13630 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
13631 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
13632
13633 </div>
13634 <div class="tags">
13635
13636
13637 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>.
13638
13639
13640 </div>
13641 </div>
13642 <div class="padding"></div>
13643
13644 <div class="entry">
13645 <div class="title">
13646 <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>
13647 </div>
13648 <div class="date">
13649 19th October 2013
13650 </div>
13651 <div class="body">
13652 <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
13653 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
13654 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
13655 web page. Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
13656 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github. If
13657 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
13658 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
13659 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
13660
13661 </div>
13662 <div class="tags">
13663
13664
13665 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>.
13666
13667
13668 </div>
13669 </div>
13670 <div class="padding"></div>
13671
13672 <div class="entry">
13673 <div class="title">
13674 <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>
13675 </div>
13676 <div class="date">
13677 15th October 2013
13678 </div>
13679 <div class="body">
13680 <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
13681 wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
13682 these. :)</p>
13683
13684 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
13685 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
13686 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
13687 more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
13688 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
13689 earmarked</a> for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
13690 hope you will to. :)</p>
13691
13692 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
13693 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
13694 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
13695 take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already
13696 donated. Are you next?</p>
13697
13698 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
13699 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
13700 statement under the heading
13701 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
13702 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
13703 Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
13704 too.</p>
13705
13706 </div>
13707 <div class="tags">
13708
13709
13710 Tags: <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>.
13711
13712
13713 </div>
13714 </div>
13715 <div class="padding"></div>
13716
13717 <div class="entry">
13718 <div class="title">
13719 <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>
13720 </div>
13721 <div class="date">
13722 11th October 2013
13723 </div>
13724 <div class="body">
13725 <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
13726 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
13727 areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
13728 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
13729 successful examples like
13730 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
13731 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
13732 (see
13733 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
13734 for a large list</a>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
13735 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
13736 can be seen from their
13737 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
13738 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
13739 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
13740 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
13741 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
13742
13743 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
13744 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
13745 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
13746 my recent involvement in
13747 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
13748 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
13749 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
13750 when possible, given that most communication between people are
13751 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
13752 communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
13753 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
13754 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
13755 important over the years.</p>
13756
13757 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
13758 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
13759 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania. They seem to
13760 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
13761 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
13762 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
13763 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
13764 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>. Unfortunately the wiki
13765 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
13766 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
13767 the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
13768 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
13769 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
13770 speakers about this talk (from
13771 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
13772
13773 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
13774
13775 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
13776 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
13777 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
13778 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
13779 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
13780 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
13781 batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
13782 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
13783 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
13784 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
13785 less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
13786 that project (from
13787 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
13788
13789 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
13790
13791 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
13792 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
13793 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
13794 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
13795 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
13796 based community mesh networks.</p>
13797
13798 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
13799 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
13800 network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
13801 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
13802 computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
13803 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
13804 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
13805 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
13806 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
13807
13808 <p><table>
13809 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
13810 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
13811 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
13812 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
13813 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
13814 </table></p>
13815
13816 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
13817 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
13818 VillageTelco about
13819 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
13820 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
13821 for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
13822 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
13823 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
13824 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
13825
13826 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
13827 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
13828 firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
13829 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
13830
13831 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
13832 us on IRC, either channel
13833 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
13834 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
13835 irc.freenode.net.</p>
13836
13837 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
13838 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
13839 and Innovation called
13840 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
13841 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
13842 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
13843 Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
13844 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
13845 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
13846 know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
13847 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
13848
13849 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
13850 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
13851 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
13852 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
13853 mesh system.</p>
13854
13855 </div>
13856 <div class="tags">
13857
13858
13859 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>.
13860
13861
13862 </div>
13863 </div>
13864 <div class="padding"></div>
13865
13866 <div class="entry">
13867 <div class="title">
13868 <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>
13869 </div>
13870 <div class="date">
13871 8th October 2013
13872 </div>
13873 <div class="body">
13874 <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
13875 Salvador had published a
13876 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
13877 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
13878 Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
13879 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
13880 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
13881 in other word a single user machine). The result is 11 minutes long,
13882 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
13883 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
13884 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
13885 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
13886 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
13887 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
13888 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
13889 computers without hard drives by installing one central
13890 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
13891
13892 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
13893
13894 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
13895
13896 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
13897 me know. :)</p>
13898
13899 </div>
13900 <div class="tags">
13901
13902
13903 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13904
13905
13906 </div>
13907 </div>
13908 <div class="padding"></div>
13909
13910 <div class="entry">
13911 <div class="title">
13912 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
13913 </div>
13914 <div class="date">
13915 29th September 2013
13916 </div>
13917 <div class="body">
13918 <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
13919 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
13920 complete announcement text can be found at
13921 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
13922 section</a>, translated to several languages. Please check it out.</p>
13923
13924 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
13925 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
13926 partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
13927 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
13928
13929 </div>
13930 <div class="tags">
13931
13932
13933 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13934
13935
13936 </div>
13937 </div>
13938 <div class="padding"></div>
13939
13940 <div class="entry">
13941 <div class="title">
13942 <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>
13943 </div>
13944 <div class="date">
13945 27th September 2013
13946 </div>
13947 <div class="body">
13948 <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
13949 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
13950 vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
13951 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
13952
13953 <ul>
13954
13955 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
13956 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
13957
13958 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
13959 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
13960
13961 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
13962 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
13963 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
13964 (Youtube)</li>
13965
13966 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
13967 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
13968
13969 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
13970 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
13971
13972 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
13973 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
13974 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
13975
13976 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
13977 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
13978 (Youtube)</li>
13979
13980 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
13981 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
13982
13983 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
13984 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
13985
13986 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
13987 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
13988 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
13989
13990 </ul>
13991
13992 <p>A larger list is available from
13993 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
13994 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
13995
13996 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
13997 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
13998 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
13999 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
14000 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
14001 pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
14002 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
14003 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
14004 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
14005 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
14006 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
14007
14008 </div>
14009 <div class="tags">
14010
14011
14012 Tags: <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>.
14013
14014
14015 </div>
14016 </div>
14017 <div class="padding"></div>
14018
14019 <div class="entry">
14020 <div class="title">
14021 <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>
14022 </div>
14023 <div class="date">
14024 16th September 2013
14025 </div>
14026 <div class="body">
14027 <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14028 today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
14029
14030 <blockquote>
14031 <p>Hi,</p>
14032
14033 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
14034 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14035 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
14036
14037 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
14038 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
14039 weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
14040 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
14041
14042 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
14043 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
14044
14045 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
14046 compared to beta1:</p>
14047
14048 <ul>
14049
14050 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
14051 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
14052 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
14053 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
14054 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
14055 main server.</li>
14056 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
14057 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
14058 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
14059 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
14060 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
14061
14062 </ul>
14063
14064 <p>Where to get it:</p>
14065
14066 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14067
14068 <ul>
14069 <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>
14070 <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>
14071 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
14072 </ul>
14073
14074 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
14075
14076 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
14077 <ul>
14078 <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>
14079 <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>
14080 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
14081 </ul>
14082
14083 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
14084
14085 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
14086 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
14087 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
14088 as the other isos.</p>
14089
14090 <p>How to report bugs</p>
14091
14092 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
14093 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14094
14095
14096 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
14097
14098 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
14099 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
14100 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
14101 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
14102 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
14103 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
14104 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
14105 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
14106 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
14107 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
14108 services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
14109 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
14110 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14111
14112 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14113 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14114 Squeeze release.</p>
14115
14116 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
14117
14118 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14119 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14120 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
14121 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
14122 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
14123 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
14124 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
14125 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
14126 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
14127 directory.</p>
14128
14129
14130 <p>cheers,
14131 <br> Holger</p>
14132 </blockquote>
14133
14134 </div>
14135 <div class="tags">
14136
14137
14138 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14139
14140
14141 </div>
14142 </div>
14143 <div class="padding"></div>
14144
14145 <div class="entry">
14146 <div class="title">
14147 <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>
14148 </div>
14149 <div class="date">
14150 10th September 2013
14151 </div>
14152 <div class="body">
14153 <p>I was introduced to the
14154 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
14155 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
14156 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
14157 within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
14158 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
14159 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
14160 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
14161 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
14162
14163 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
14164 taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
14165 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
14166 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
14167 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
14168
14169 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
14170 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
14171 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
14172 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
14173 communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
14174 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
14175 which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
14176 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
14177 it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
14178 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
14179 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
14180 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
14181 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
14182 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
14183 missing in Debian).</p>
14184
14185 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
14186 scripts
14187 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
14188 and a administrative web interface
14189 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
14190 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
14191 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
14192 (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
14193 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
14194 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
14195 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>). The
14196 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
14197 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
14198 this is really working yet, see
14199 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
14200 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
14201 on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
14202 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
14203 users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
14204 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
14205 with lots of half baked features.</p>
14206
14207 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
14208 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
14209 at.</p>
14210
14211 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
14212
14213 <ol>
14214
14215 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
14216 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
14217 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
14218 to the Debian installer:<p>
14219 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
14220
14221 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
14222 install on.</li>
14223
14224 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
14225 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
14226
14227 </ol>
14228
14229 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
14230
14231 <ol>
14232
14233 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
14234 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
14235 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
14236 <pre>
14237 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
14238 </pre></li>
14239 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
14240 <pre>
14241 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
14242 apt-key add -
14243 apt-get update
14244 apt-get install freedombox-setup
14245 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
14246 </pre></li>
14247 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
14248
14249 </ol>
14250
14251 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
14252 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
14253 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
14254 in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
14255 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
14256
14257 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
14258 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
14259 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
14260 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
14261
14262 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
14263 problems. We gather on the IRC channel
14264 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
14265 irc.debian.org and the
14266 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
14267 mailing list</a>.</p>
14268
14269 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
14270 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
14271 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
14272 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
14273 to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the
14274 default password is 'secret'.</p>
14275
14276 </div>
14277 <div class="tags">
14278
14279
14280 Tags: <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>.
14281
14282
14283 </div>
14284 </div>
14285 <div class="padding"></div>
14286
14287 <div class="entry">
14288 <div class="title">
14289 <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>
14290 </div>
14291 <div class="date">
14292 22nd August 2013
14293 </div>
14294 <div class="body">
14295 <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14296 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
14297 integration fixes . This is the release announcement:</p>
14298
14299 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
14300
14301 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14302 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14303
14304 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14305
14306 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14307 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14308 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14309 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14310 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14311 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14312 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14313 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
14314 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14315 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14316 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14317 desktop contains
14318 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14319 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14320 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14321 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14322
14323 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
14324 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
14325 release.</p>
14326
14327 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14328 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14329 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
14330 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
14331 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
14332 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
14333 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
14334 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
14335 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
14336 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
14337 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
14338
14339 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14340
14341 <ul>
14342
14343 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
14344 work also without a attached tty.</li>
14345 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
14346 make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
14347 tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
14348 has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
14349 required).</li>
14350
14351 </ul>
14352
14353 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14354
14355 <ul>
14356
14357 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
14358 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
14359 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
14360 stick ISO image.</li>
14361 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
14362 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
14363 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
14364 during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
14365 cope with this.</li>
14366 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
14367 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
14368 empty password hashes.</li>
14369 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
14370 smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
14371 from joining the Samba domain.</li>
14372
14373 </ul>
14374
14375 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14376
14377 <ul>
14378
14379 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
14380 not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
14381 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
14382 (using the KDE configuration).</li>
14383
14384 </ul>
14385
14386 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14387
14388 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14389
14390 <ul>
14391
14392 <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>
14393
14394 <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>
14395
14396 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
14397
14398 </ul>
14399
14400 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
14401 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
14402
14403 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
14404
14405 <ul>
14406
14407 <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>
14408 <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>
14409 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
14410
14411 </ul>
14412
14413 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
14414 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
14415
14416
14417 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14418
14419 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
14420
14421 </div>
14422 <div class="tags">
14423
14424
14425 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14426
14427
14428 </div>
14429 </div>
14430 <div class="padding"></div>
14431
14432 <div class="entry">
14433 <div class="title">
14434 <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>
14435 </div>
14436 <div class="date">
14437 18th August 2013
14438 </div>
14439 <div class="body">
14440 <p>Earlier, I reported about
14441 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
14442 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>. Friday I was
14443 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away. And as
14444 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
14445 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
14446 currently on the disk.</p>
14447
14448 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
14449 <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>
14450 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
14451 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
14452 disks. I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
14453 booted the ISO from a USB stick. The disk was recognized, but the
14454 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
14455 to insert any Intel firmware. So no change, and the disk is still
14456 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
14457 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware. No idea how likely
14458 that is. Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness. I
14459 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
14460 the broken disks.</p>
14461
14462 </div>
14463 <div class="tags">
14464
14465
14466 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14467
14468
14469 </div>
14470 </div>
14471 <div class="padding"></div>
14472
14473 <div class="entry">
14474 <div class="title">
14475 <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>
14476 </div>
14477 <div class="date">
14478 2nd August 2013
14479 </div>
14480 <div class="body">
14481 <p>It has been a while since my last update. Since last summer, I
14482 have worked on a Norwegian
14483 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
14484 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
14485 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
14486 law. Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
14487 number of strings to translate. Due to real life constraints, I have
14488 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
14489 I found time to work on it again. Still lots of work left, but the
14490 first draft is nearing completion. I created a graph to show the
14491 progress of the translation:</p>
14492
14493 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
14494
14495 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
14496 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
14497 drawings need to be fixed. There are probably also some index entries
14498 missing that need to be added. This can be done by comparing the
14499 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
14500 English docbook version with the paper version. Last, the colophon
14501 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
14502 done. I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
14503 of the index pages. All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
14504 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
14505 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
14506
14507 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
14508 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
14509 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
14510 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
14511 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
14512 around? There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
14513 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
14514 project files currently available from
14515 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
14516
14517 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
14518 the updated
14519 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
14520 and
14521 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
14522 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
14523 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
14524 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
14525
14526 </div>
14527 <div class="tags">
14528
14529
14530 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>.
14531
14532
14533 </div>
14534 </div>
14535 <div class="padding"></div>
14536
14537 <div class="entry">
14538 <div class="title">
14539 <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>
14540 </div>
14541 <div class="date">
14542 27th July 2013
14543 </div>
14544 <div class="body">
14545 <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14546 today. This is the release announcement:</p>
14547
14548 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
14549 2013-07-27</strong></p>
14550
14551 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14552 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14553
14554 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14555
14556 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14557 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14558 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14559 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14560 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14561 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14562 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14563 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14564 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14565 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14566 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14567 desktop contains
14568 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14569 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14570 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14571 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14572
14573 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14574 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14575 Squeeze release.</p>
14576
14577 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14578 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14579 release.</p>
14580
14581 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14582
14583 <ul>
14584
14585 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
14586 for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
14587 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
14588 packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
14589 by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
14590 installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
14591 and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
14592 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
14593 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
14594 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
14595 crash bugs.</li>
14596
14597 </ul>
14598
14599 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14600
14601 <ul>
14602
14603 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
14604 desktop=gnome installations.</li>
14605 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
14606 netinst CD.</li>
14607 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
14608 setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
14609 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
14610 install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
14611 with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
14612 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
14613 exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
14614 name setting at run time to work again.</li>
14615 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
14616 fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
14617 updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
14618 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
14619 (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
14620 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
14621
14622 </ul>
14623
14624 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14625
14626 <ul>
14627
14628 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
14629 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
14630 not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
14631 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
14632
14633 </ul>
14634
14635 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14636
14637 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14638
14639 <ul>
14640
14641 <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>
14642
14643 <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>
14644
14645 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
14646
14647 </ul>
14648
14649 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
14650 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
14651
14652 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
14653
14654 <ul>
14655
14656 <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>
14657 <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>
14658 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
14659
14660 </ul>
14661
14662 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
14663 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
14664
14665
14666 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14667
14668 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
14669
14670 </div>
14671 <div class="tags">
14672
14673
14674 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14675
14676
14677 </div>
14678 </div>
14679 <div class="padding"></div>
14680
14681 <div class="entry">
14682 <div class="title">
14683 <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>
14684 </div>
14685 <div class="date">
14686 17th July 2013
14687 </div>
14688 <div class="body">
14689 <p>Today I switched to
14690 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
14691 new laptop</a>. I've previously written about the problems I had with
14692 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
14693 <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
14694 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
14695 sustained writes. My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
14696 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
14697 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
14698 disk instead to fix it once and for all. The Samsung disk survived
14699 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
14700 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
14701 decided to trust it with my data. I have installed it as a Debian Edu
14702 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
14703 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
14704 station from now on.</p>
14705
14706 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
14707 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
14708 performance and increase life time of the disk. The Linux kernel and
14709 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
14710 environment. To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
14711 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning. The
14712 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
14713 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
14714 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
14715 package. If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
14716 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
14717 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
14718
14719 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
14720 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD. It is adjusted to my use case,
14721 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
14722 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
14723 top of this again. See the README file in the package source for the
14724 references I used to pick the settings. At the moment these
14725 parameters are tuned:</p>
14726
14727 <ul>
14728
14729 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
14730 (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
14731
14732 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
14733 this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
14734 0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
14735
14736 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
14737 systems.</li>
14738
14739 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
14740 /etc/fstab.</li>
14741
14742 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
14743
14744 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
14745 cron.daily).</li>
14746
14747 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
14748 to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
14749
14750 </ul>
14751
14752 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
14753 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
14754 little gain. My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
14755 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
14756 computer. I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
14757 from getting the data on the disk (see
14758 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
14759 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
14760 right thing to do.</p>
14761
14762 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
14763 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
14764 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
14765
14766 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
14767 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
14768 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
14769 instead of during my work.</p>
14770
14771 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
14772 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
14773
14774 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning. I expect
14775 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
14776 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
14777
14778 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
14779 there.</p>
14780
14781 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
14782 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
14783 disk. It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
14784 the Lenovo firmware. But I have not tried and did not want to do so
14785 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
14786 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
14787 back.</p>
14788
14789 </div>
14790 <div class="tags">
14791
14792
14793 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14794
14795
14796 </div>
14797 </div>
14798 <div class="padding"></div>
14799
14800 <div class="entry">
14801 <div class="title">
14802 <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>
14803 </div>
14804 <div class="date">
14805 10th July 2013
14806 </div>
14807 <div class="body">
14808 <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
14809 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
14810 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
14811 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
14812 sustained write. My supplier is in contact with
14813 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
14814 replacement disk to try to fix the problem. They decided to send an
14815 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
14816
14817 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
14818 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it. The new disk have the
14819 same firmware version as the original. This time my hope raised
14820 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
14821 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
14822 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%. But around 60%, the disk
14823 died again and I was back on square one. I still do not have a new
14824 laptop with a disk I can trust. I can not live with a disk that might
14825 lock up when I download a new
14826 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
14827 other large files. I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
14828 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
14829
14830 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
14831 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
14832 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
14833 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
14834 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
14835 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
14836
14837 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
14838 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
14839 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
14840 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
14841 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
14842 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
14843
14844 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
14845 SA, date and WNPP values. Mentioning all the details here in case
14846 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
14847 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
14848 exist).</p>
14849
14850 </div>
14851 <div class="tags">
14852
14853
14854 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14855
14856
14857 </div>
14858 </div>
14859 <div class="padding"></div>
14860
14861 <div class="entry">
14862 <div class="title">
14863 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
14864 </div>
14865 <div class="date">
14866 9th July 2013
14867 </div>
14868 <div class="body">
14869 <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
14870 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
14871 party in Oslo. It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
14872 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
14873 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14874 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
14875 Bitraf</a>.</p>
14876
14877 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is
14878 welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other
14879 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people. Please put your name
14880 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
14881 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
14882
14883 </div>
14884 <div class="tags">
14885
14886
14887 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>.
14888
14889
14890 </div>
14891 </div>
14892 <div class="padding"></div>
14893
14894 <div class="entry">
14895 <div class="title">
14896 <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>
14897 </div>
14898 <div class="date">
14899 5th July 2013
14900 </div>
14901 <div class="body">
14902 <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
14903 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
14904 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>. Unfortunately I did not have much
14905 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
14906 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived. I
14907 ended up picking a
14908 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
14909 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
14910 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly. But my
14911 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful. More
14912 on that below.</p>
14913
14914 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14915 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
14916 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
14917 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
14918 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
14919 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
14920 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
14921 disks from my search parameters. I also asked around among friends to
14922 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
14923
14924 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
14925 X41. I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
14926 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
14927 hand a lot more to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly
14928 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
14929 I will get used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
14930 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
14931
14932 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple. All it took was a quick
14933 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
14934
14935 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop. The 180 GB SSD disk
14936 lock up during load. And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
14937 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
14938 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
14939 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
14940 default in Ubuntu). And the bug with is already known. It was
14941 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
14942 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
14943 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD). It is also reported to the Linux
14944 kernel developers as
14945 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
14946 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
14947 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
14948 Lenovo forums, both for
14949 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
14950 2012-11-10</a> and for
14951 <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
14952 03-20-2013</a>. The problem do not only affect installation. The
14953 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
14954 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
14955 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
14956 There is even a
14957 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
14958 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
14959 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
14960
14961 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
14962 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
14963 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
14964 firmware. Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
14965 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i). I
14966 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
14967 fixed. :)</p>
14968
14969 </div>
14970 <div class="tags">
14971
14972
14973 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14974
14975
14976 </div>
14977 </div>
14978 <div class="padding"></div>
14979
14980 <div class="entry">
14981 <div class="title">
14982 <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>
14983 </div>
14984 <div class="date">
14985 4th July 2013
14986 </div>
14987 <div class="body">
14988 <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
14989 trusty old Thinkpad X41. Unfortunately I did not have much time to
14990 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived. I ended up
14991 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
14992 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu
14993 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly. As I write
14994 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
14995 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
14996 with an expencive door stop.</p>
14997
14998 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14999 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
15000 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
15001 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
15002 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
15003 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
15004 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
15005
15006 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
15007 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
15008 to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly good and the
15009 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
15010 used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
15011 new laptop now. :)</p>
15012
15013 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
15014
15015 </div>
15016 <div class="tags">
15017
15018
15019 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15020
15021
15022 </div>
15023 </div>
15024 <div class="padding"></div>
15025
15026 <div class="entry">
15027 <div class="title">
15028 <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>
15029 </div>
15030 <div class="date">
15031 3rd July 2013
15032 </div>
15033 <div class="body">
15034 <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
15035 today. This is the release announcement:</p>
15036
15037 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
15038 2013-07-03</strong></p>
15039
15040 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15041 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
15042
15043 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15044
15045 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
15046 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15047 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15048 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
15049 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15050 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15051 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15052 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
15053 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
15054 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
15055 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
15056 desktop contains
15057 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
15058 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
15059 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
15060 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
15061
15062 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
15063 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
15064 Squeeze release.</p>
15065
15066 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15067 <ul>
15068 <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
15069 <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
15070 submenu. It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
15071 brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
15072 <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
15073 they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
15074 menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
15075 <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
15076 multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
15077 X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
15078 too.</li>
15079 <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
15080 are too few to make the package useful.</li>
15081 </ul>
15082 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15083 <ul>
15084 <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
15085 <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
15086 <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
15087 up for some language options.</li>
15088 <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
15089 <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
15090 <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
15091 d-i is doing it.</li>
15092 <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
15093 debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
15094 <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
15095 script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
15096 Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
15097 <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
15098 installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
15099 <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
15100 <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
15101 and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
15102 <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
15103 work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
15104 </ul>
15105 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
15106 <ul>
15107 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15108 available yet (698840).</li>
15109 <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
15110 </ul>
15111 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15112
15113 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15114 <ul>
15115 <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>
15116 <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>
15117 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
15118 </ul>
15119
15120 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
15121 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
15122
15123 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
15124 <ul>
15125 <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>
15126 <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>
15127 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
15128 </ul>
15129
15130 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
15131 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
15132
15133 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15134
15135 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15136
15137 </div>
15138 <div class="tags">
15139
15140
15141 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15142
15143
15144 </div>
15145 </div>
15146 <div class="padding"></div>
15147
15148 <div class="entry">
15149 <div class="title">
15150 <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>
15151 </div>
15152 <div class="date">
15153 25th June 2013
15154 </div>
15155 <div class="body">
15156 <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
15157 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
15158 working. One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
15159 needed to get the hardware on my computer working. Most often this
15160 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
15161 controller or the ethernet card. Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
15162 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
15163 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
15164 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
15165 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
15166 debian packages. Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
15167
15168 <p><pre>
15169 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
15170 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
15171 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
15172 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
15173 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
15174 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
15175 firmware-ipw2x00
15176 firmware-ipw2x00
15177 Preconfiguring packages ...
15178 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
15179 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
15180 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
15181 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
15182 #
15183 </pre></p>
15184
15185 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
15186 printed instead:</p>
15187
15188 <p><pre>
15189 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
15190 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
15191 #
15192 </pre></p>
15193
15194 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
15195 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
15196
15197 <p>So, how does it work? It look at the set of currently loaded
15198 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
15199 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information. Next, it
15200 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
15201 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
15202 requested firmware file. If the package is in the non-free section, a
15203 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
15204 <tt>apt-get install</tt>. The end result is a slightly better working
15205 machine.</p>
15206
15207 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
15208 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
15209 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
15210 #655507</a>. There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
15211 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
15212 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
15213
15214 </div>
15215 <div class="tags">
15216
15217
15218 Tags: <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>.
15219
15220
15221 </div>
15222 </div>
15223 <div class="padding"></div>
15224
15225 <div class="entry">
15226 <div class="title">
15227 <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>
15228 </div>
15229 <div class="date">
15230 22nd June 2013
15231 </div>
15232 <div class="body">
15233 <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15234 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
15235 which check that services are running, working, and return the
15236 expected results. It runs automatically just after the first boot on
15237 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
15238 installations (using non-test ISOs). It test that the LDAP service is
15239 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
15240 online resizable, etc, etc. And it check that the PXE service is
15241 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
15242
15243 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
15244 Edu Wheezy release. These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
15245 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
15246 happen all the needed packages need to be on them. Thanks to our test
15247 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
15248 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
15249 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
15250 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
15251 working packages to get it working. And the packages changed name
15252 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
15253 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
15254 packages during installation. Without our test suite, I suspect we
15255 would never have discovered this before release. Now it is fixed
15256 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
15257
15258 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
15259 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
15260 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
15261 any errors are detected. This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
15262 the problem.</p>
15263
15264 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
15265 please join us on
15266 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
15267 irc.debian.org</a> and the
15268 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
15269 list.</p>
15270
15271 </div>
15272 <div class="tags">
15273
15274
15275 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15276
15277
15278 </div>
15279 </div>
15280 <div class="padding"></div>
15281
15282 <div class="entry">
15283 <div class="title">
15284 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
15285 </div>
15286 <div class="date">
15287 17th June 2013
15288 </div>
15289 <div class="body">
15290 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
15291 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
15292 globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
15293 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
15294 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
15295 worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
15296 help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
15297 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
15298
15299 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15300
15301 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
15302 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
15303 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
15304 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
15305 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
15306 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
15307 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
15308 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
15309 field.</p>
15310
15311 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
15312 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
15313 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
15314 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
15315 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
15316 the only one we have in our country.</p>
15317
15318 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15319 project?</strong></p>
15320
15321 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
15322 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
15323 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
15324 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
15325 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
15326 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
15327 ways to contribute.</p>
15328
15329 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
15330 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
15331 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
15332 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
15333 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
15334 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
15335 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
15336 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
15337 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
15338 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
15339
15340 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15341 Edu?</strong></p>
15342
15343 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
15344 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
15345 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
15346 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
15347 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
15348 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
15349 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
15350 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
15351
15352 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
15353 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
15354 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
15355 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
15356 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
15357 project.</p>
15358
15359 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15360 Edu?</strong></p>
15361
15362 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
15363 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
15364 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
15365 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
15366 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
15367 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
15368 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
15369 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
15370 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
15371
15372 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
15373 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
15374 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
15375 on.</p>
15376
15377 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15378
15379 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
15380 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
15381 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
15382 Enlightenment project a lot!),
15383 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
15384 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
15385 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
15386 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
15387 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
15388
15389 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15390 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15391
15392 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
15393 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
15394 that:</p>
15395
15396 <ul>
15397
15398 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
15399
15400 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
15401 experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
15402 of teenagers more?</li>
15403
15404 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
15405 be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
15406 other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
15407 them!)</li>
15408
15409 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
15410 lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
15411 person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
15412
15413 </ul>
15414
15415 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
15416 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
15417 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
15418 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
15419 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
15420
15421 </div>
15422 <div class="tags">
15423
15424
15425 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
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/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
15435 </div>
15436 <div class="date">
15437 12th June 2013
15438 </div>
15439 <div class="body">
15440 <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
15441 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15442 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
15443 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
15444 effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is
15445 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
15446
15447 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15448
15449 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
15450 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
15451 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
15452
15453 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
15454 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
15455 each other.</p>
15456
15457 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15458 project?</strong></p>
15459
15460 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
15461 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
15462 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
15463 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
15464 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
15465 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
15466 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
15467 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
15468 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
15469 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
15470 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
15471 we'll get there one day.</p>
15472
15473 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15474 Edu?</strong></p>
15475
15476 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
15477 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
15478 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
15479 very high quality work.</p>
15480
15481 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
15482 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
15483 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
15484 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
15485 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
15486
15487 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15488 Edu?</strong></p>
15489
15490 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
15491 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
15492 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
15493
15494 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
15495 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
15496 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
15497 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
15498 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
15499 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
15500 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
15501 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
15502 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
15503 currently.</p>
15504
15505 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
15506 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
15507 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
15508 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
15509 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
15510 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
15511 autonomous.</p>
15512
15513 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15514
15515 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
15516 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
15517 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
15518 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
15519 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
15520
15521 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
15522 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
15523 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
15524 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
15525 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
15526 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
15527 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
15528 X.</p>
15529
15530 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
15531 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
15532 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
15533 it :p)
15534
15535 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15536 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15537
15538 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
15539 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
15540 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
15541 that.</p>
15542
15543 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
15544 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
15545 advantage of that.</p>
15546
15547 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
15548 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
15549 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
15550 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
15551 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
15552 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
15553 best solution for them.</p>
15554
15555 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
15556 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
15557 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
15558
15559 </div>
15560 <div class="tags">
15561
15562
15563 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15564
15565
15566 </div>
15567 </div>
15568 <div class="padding"></div>
15569
15570 <div class="entry">
15571 <div class="title">
15572 <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>
15573 </div>
15574 <div class="date">
15575 11th June 2013
15576 </div>
15577 <div class="body">
15578 <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
15579 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
15580 or on first boot from the hard disk. I've seen it once in a while the
15581 last few years, but only recently understood the cause. I've seen it
15582 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
15583 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops. The system to
15584 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
15585 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead. I do
15586 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
15587 i915 driver used by the
15588 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
15589 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
15590
15591 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways. Either by adding
15592 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
15593 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
15594 option when it load the i915 kernel module. On Debian and Ubuntu, it
15595 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
15596
15597 <pre>
15598 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
15599 update-initramfs -u -k all
15600 </pre>
15601
15602 <p>Since March 2012 there is
15603 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
15604 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
15605 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
15606 brightness setting automatically. To use it, one need to add a row in
15607 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
15608 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
15609 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
15610 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
15611 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
15612 number.</p>
15613
15614 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
15615 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
15616
15617 <p><pre>
15618 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
15619 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
15620 (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
15621 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
15622 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
15623 ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
15624 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
15625 <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
15626 Latency: 0
15627 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
15628 Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
15629 Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
15630 Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
15631 Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
15632 Capabilities: <access denied>
15633 Kernel driver in use: i915
15634 </pre></p>
15635
15636 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
15637
15638 <p><pre>
15639 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
15640 ...
15641 /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
15642 { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
15643 ...
15644 }
15645 </pre></p>
15646
15647 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
15648 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
15649 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
15650 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
15651 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
15652 developers. But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
15653 yet shown up in
15654 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
15655 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
15656 emails from non-subscribers. Because of this, I sent my patch also to
15657 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
15658 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
15659 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
15660
15661 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
15662 with this problem working properly with Linux. If you use Gnome, your
15663 worries should be over at this point. But if you use KDE, there is
15664 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
15665 the screen during login. I've reported it to Debian as
15666 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
15667 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
15668 this. Perhaps you can help? Perhaps you know what the Gnome
15669 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
15670 developers? Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
15671 during login? If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
15672 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
15673
15674 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
15675 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
15676 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
15677 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
15678 backlight.</p>
15679
15680 </div>
15681 <div class="tags">
15682
15683
15684 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15685
15686
15687 </div>
15688 </div>
15689 <div class="padding"></div>
15690
15691 <div class="entry">
15692 <div class="title">
15693 <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>
15694 </div>
15695 <div class="date">
15696 10th June 2013
15697 </div>
15698 <div class="body">
15699 <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
15700 today. This is the release announcement:</p>
15701
15702 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
15703 2013-06-10</strong></p>
15704
15705 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
15706 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
15707
15708 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15709
15710 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
15711 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15712 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15713 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
15714 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15715 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15716 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15717 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
15718 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
15719 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
15720 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
15721 desktop contains
15722 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
15723 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
15724 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
15725 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
15726
15727 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
15728 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
15729 Squeeze release.</p>
15730
15731 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15732
15733 <ul>
15734
15735 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
15736 <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).
15737 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
15738 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
15739 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
15740
15741 </ul>
15742
15743 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15744
15745 <ul>
15746
15747 <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.
15748 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
15749 <li>New Romanian translation.
15750 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
15751 <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).
15752 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
15753 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
15754 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
15755 <li>More testsuite tests.
15756 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
15757 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
15758
15759 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
15760 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
15761
15762 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
15763 them up with GOsa².</li>
15764
15765 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
15766
15767 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
15768 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
15769 entered password). </li>
15770
15771 </ul>
15772
15773 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
15774
15775 <ul>
15776
15777 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
15778
15779 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15780 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
15781 missing import feature).</li>
15782
15783 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
15784
15785 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
15786 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
15787 unfixed.</li>
15788
15789 </ul>
15790
15791 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15792
15793 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15794
15795 <ul>
15796
15797 <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>
15798
15799 <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>
15800
15801 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
15802
15803 </ul>
15804
15805 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
15806 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
15807
15808 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15809
15810 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
15811
15812 </div>
15813 <div class="tags">
15814
15815
15816 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15817
15818
15819 </div>
15820 </div>
15821 <div class="padding"></div>
15822
15823 <div class="entry">
15824 <div class="title">
15825 <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>
15826 </div>
15827 <div class="date">
15828 5th June 2013
15829 </div>
15830 <div class="body">
15831 <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
15832 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
15833 hope to get released soon. The two problems require some with PHP
15834 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
15835 the project:
15836
15837 <ol>
15838
15839 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
15840 (slbackup-php) using the root user and password. This is
15841 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
15842 This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
15843 Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
15844
15845 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
15846 using ldif nor using CSV files. The feature was disabled after a
15847 major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
15848 This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
15849 #698840</a>.</li>
15850
15851 </ol>
15852
15853 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
15854 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
15855 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
15856
15857 </div>
15858 <div class="tags">
15859
15860
15861 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15862
15863
15864 </div>
15865 </div>
15866 <div class="padding"></div>
15867
15868 <div class="entry">
15869 <div class="title">
15870 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
15871 </div>
15872 <div class="date">
15873 4th June 2013
15874 </div>
15875 <div class="body">
15876 <p>It has been a while since my last English
15877 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
15878 interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
15879 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
15880 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
15881 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
15882
15883 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15884
15885 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
15886 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
15887 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
15888 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
15889
15890 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
15891 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
15892 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
15893
15894 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15895 project?</strong></p>
15896
15897 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
15898 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
15899 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
15900 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
15901 manual.
15902
15903 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
15904 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
15905 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
15906 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
15907
15908 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
15909 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
15910 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>. What pleased
15911 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
15912 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
15913 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
15914 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
15915 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
15916 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
15917 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
15918
15919 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
15920 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
15921 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
15922 beautiful project.</p>
15923
15924 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15925 Edu?</strong></p>
15926
15927 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
15928 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
15929 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
15930
15931 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
15932 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
15933 of educational free software.</p>
15934
15935 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15936 Edu?</strong></p>
15937
15938 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
15939 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
15940 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
15941 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
15942 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
15943
15944 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
15945 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
15946 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
15947 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
15948 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
15949 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
15950 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
15951 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
15952
15953 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15954
15955 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
15956 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
15957 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
15958 also using the mathematical software
15959 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
15960 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
15961 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
15962
15963 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
15964 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
15965 statistics?</strong></p>
15966
15967 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
15968 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
15969 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
15970 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
15971
15972 <ul>
15973
15974 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
15975 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
15976 constructions in planar geometry
15977
15978 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
15979 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
15980 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
15981
15982 </ul>
15983
15984 <p>I like also
15985 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
15986 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
15987 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
15988
15989 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15990 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15991
15992 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
15993
15994 <ul>
15995
15996 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
15997
15998 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
15999 well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
16000 OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
16001
16002 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
16003
16004 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
16005 system.</li>
16006
16007 </ul>
16008
16009 </div>
16010 <div class="tags">
16011
16012
16013 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
16014
16015
16016 </div>
16017 </div>
16018 <div class="padding"></div>
16019
16020 <div class="entry">
16021 <div class="title">
16022 <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>
16023 </div>
16024 <div class="date">
16025 1st June 2013
16026 </div>
16027 <div class="body">
16028 <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
16029 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
16030 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn. We have tried to
16031 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
16032 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
16033 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
16034 debtag field. Here it is. Click on a image to learn more about the
16035 program.</p>
16036
16037 <!-- 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 -->
16038
16039 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
16040 <p>
16041 <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>
16042 <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>
16043 <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>
16044 <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>
16045 <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>
16046 <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>
16047 <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>
16048 <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>
16049 <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>
16050 <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>
16051 <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>
16052 <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>
16053 <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>
16054 <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>
16055 </p>
16056
16057 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
16058 <p>
16059 <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>
16060 <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>
16061 <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>
16062 <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>
16063 <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>
16064 <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>
16065 </p>
16066
16067 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
16068 <p>
16069 <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>
16070 </p>
16071
16072 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
16073 <p>
16074 <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>
16075 <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>
16076 <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>
16077 <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>
16078 <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>
16079 <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>
16080 <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>
16081 <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>
16082 <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>
16083 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
16084 <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>
16085 </p>
16086
16087 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
16088 <p>
16089 <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>
16090 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
16091 </p>
16092
16093 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
16094 <p>
16095 <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>
16096 <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>
16097 <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>
16098 </p>
16099
16100 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
16101 <p>
16102 <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>
16103 <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>
16104 <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>
16105 <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>
16106 <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>
16107 </p>
16108
16109 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
16110 <p>
16111 <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>
16112 <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>
16113 <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>
16114 <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>
16115 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
16116 <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>
16117 <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>
16118 <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>
16119 <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>
16120 <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>
16121 <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>
16122 <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>
16123 <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>
16124 <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>
16125 <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>
16126 <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>
16127 <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>
16128 </p>
16129
16130 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
16131 <p>
16132 <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>
16133 <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>
16134 </p>
16135
16136 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
16137 <p>
16138 <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>
16139 <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>
16140 <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>
16141 <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>
16142 <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>
16143 <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>
16144 <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>
16145 <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>
16146 <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>
16147 <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>
16148 </p>
16149
16150 <p>In total, 61 applications. 3 of them lacked screen shots on
16151 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>. If
16152 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
16153 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
16154 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
16155 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
16156 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
16157
16158 </div>
16159 <div class="tags">
16160
16161
16162 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16163
16164
16165 </div>
16166 </div>
16167 <div class="padding"></div>
16168
16169 <div class="entry">
16170 <div class="title">
16171 <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>
16172 </div>
16173 <div class="date">
16174 27th May 2013
16175 </div>
16176 <div class="body">
16177 <p>Two days ago, I asked
16178 <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
16179 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
16180 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>. I found a solution, but am horrified
16181 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
16182 and Windows 8.</p>
16183
16184 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
16185 secure booting or fast boot. I suspect fast boot was the problem,
16186 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
16187 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
16188 enough to tell.</p>
16189
16190 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
16191 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive! This is as far as I
16192 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
16193 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement. I am told (and
16194 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
16195 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8. But as I believe the terms
16196 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
16197 was never an alternative. I do not enter agreements I do not intend
16198 to follow.</p>
16199
16200 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
16201 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
16202 work. But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
16203 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops. Is
16204 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
16205 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
16206 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms? Or at least not
16207 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
16208
16209 <p>I've updated the
16210 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
16211 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
16212 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
16213 machine.</p>
16214
16215 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
16216 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
16217
16218 </div>
16219 <div class="tags">
16220
16221
16222 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16223
16224
16225 </div>
16226 </div>
16227 <div class="padding"></div>
16228
16229 <div class="entry">
16230 <div class="title">
16231 <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>
16232 </div>
16233 <div class="date">
16234 25th May 2013
16235 </div>
16236 <div class="body">
16237 <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days. I bought three
16238 new laptops for my parents and a few others. I bought Packard Bell
16239 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer. But I
16240 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it. The
16241 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
16242 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
16243
16244 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
16245 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick. I have yet
16246 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work. when I turn on
16247 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
16248 the normal boot menu. I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
16249 USB stick booting. When booting, it first ask for the language to
16250 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
16251 Windows 8 terms of use. As these terms are completely unacceptable to
16252 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
16253 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
16254
16255 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
16256 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
16257 EasyNote LV</a> model. If you have any idea how to get Linux
16258 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
16259 page. If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
16260 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
16261
16262 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
16263 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
16264 on new Laptops?</p>
16265
16266 </div>
16267 <div class="tags">
16268
16269
16270 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16271
16272
16273 </div>
16274 </div>
16275 <div class="padding"></div>
16276
16277 <div class="entry">
16278 <div class="title">
16279 <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>
16280 </div>
16281 <div class="date">
16282 17th May 2013
16283 </div>
16284 <div class="body">
16285 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
16286 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
16287 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
16288 pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
16289 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
16290 educational software. The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
16291 2001-07-02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
16292 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
16293 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
16294 donate some money</a>.
16295
16296 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
16297 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
16298 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn't very
16299 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
16300 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
16301
16302 <p>The script,
16303 <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/>
16304 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
16305 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
16306 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
16307
16308 <ol>
16309
16310 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
16311 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
16312 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
16313 our configuration.</li>
16314 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
16315 /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
16316 according to the profile specified in the config above,
16317 overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
16318 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
16319 that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
16320 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
16321
16322 </ol>
16323
16324 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
16325 replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
16326 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
16327 the needed packages.</p>
16328
16329 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
16330 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
16331 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
16332 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
16333 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
16334 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
16335
16336 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
16337 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
16338 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
16339
16340 <p><pre>
16341 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
16342 DESKTOP="lxde"
16343 </pre></p>
16344
16345 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
16346 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
16347 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
16348 boot.</p>
16349
16350 </div>
16351 <div class="tags">
16352
16353
16354 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>.
16355
16356
16357 </div>
16358 </div>
16359 <div class="padding"></div>
16360
16361 <div class="entry">
16362 <div class="title">
16363 <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>
16364 </div>
16365 <div class="date">
16366 14th May 2013
16367 </div>
16368 <div class="body">
16369 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16370 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
16371 release today. This is the release announcement:</p>
16372
16373 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
16374 2013-05-14</strong></p>
16375
16376 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
16377 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
16378 codename "Wheezy".</p>
16379
16380 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16381
16382 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
16383 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
16384 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
16385 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
16386 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
16387 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
16388 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
16389 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
16390
16391 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
16392 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
16393 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
16394
16395 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16396 <ul>
16397 <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
16398 default.</li>
16399 <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
16400 <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
16401 <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
16402 ibus-anthy.</li>
16403 </ul>
16404
16405 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16406 <ul>
16407
16408 <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
16409 reliability improvements.</li>
16410 <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
16411 of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
16412 <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
16413 problems.</li>
16414 <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
16415 direct:// URL.</li>
16416 <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
16417 <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
16418 <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
16419 <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
16420 servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
16421 <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
16422 log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
16423 </ul>
16424
16425 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
16426 <ul>
16427
16428 <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
16429 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>). Only install
16430 libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
16431 <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
16432 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
16433 available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
16434 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
16435 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
16436 <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
16437 (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
16438 <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
16439 password submission problem
16440 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
16441
16442 </ul>
16443
16444 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16445
16446 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16447 <ul>
16448
16449 <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>
16450 <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>
16451 <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>
16452
16453 </ul>
16454
16455 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
16456
16457 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
16458
16459 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16460
16461 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
16462
16463 </div>
16464 <div class="tags">
16465
16466
16467 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16468
16469
16470 </div>
16471 </div>
16472 <div class="padding"></div>
16473
16474 <div class="entry">
16475 <div class="title">
16476 <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>
16477 </div>
16478 <div class="date">
16479 11th May 2013
16480 </div>
16481 <div class="body">
16482 <P>In January,
16483 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
16484 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
16485 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
16486 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
16487 marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created
16488 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
16489 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several
16490 people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my
16491 call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
16492 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
16493 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
16494 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
16495
16496 <p><table>
16497 <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>
16498 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
16499 <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>
16500 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
16501 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
16502 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
16503 <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>
16504 <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>
16505 <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>
16506 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
16507 </table></p>
16508
16509 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
16510 currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only
16511 available in experimental.</p>
16512
16513 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
16514 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
16515 for LEGO designers.</p>
16516
16517 </div>
16518 <div class="tags">
16519
16520
16521 Tags: <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>.
16522
16523
16524 </div>
16525 </div>
16526 <div class="padding"></div>
16527
16528 <div class="entry">
16529 <div class="title">
16530 <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>
16531 </div>
16532 <div class="date">
16533 5th May 2013
16534 </div>
16535 <div class="body">
16536 <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
16537 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
16538 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
16539 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
16540 soon.</p>
16541
16542 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
16543 in particular make me very happy to see included. The
16544 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
16545 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
16546 included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
16547 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
16548 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
16549 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
16550 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
16551 computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
16552 Edu.</a>
16553
16554 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
16555 Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
16556 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
16557 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
16558 follow.<p>
16559
16560 </div>
16561 <div class="tags">
16562
16563
16564 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>.
16565
16566
16567 </div>
16568 </div>
16569 <div class="padding"></div>
16570
16571 <div class="entry">
16572 <div class="title">
16573 <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>
16574 </div>
16575 <div class="date">
16576 26th April 2013
16577 </div>
16578 <div class="body">
16579 <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
16580 its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release
16581 announcement:</p>
16582
16583 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
16584 2013-04-26</strong></p>
16585
16586 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
16587 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
16588
16589 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16590
16591 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
16592 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16593 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16594 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
16595 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16596 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16597 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16598 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
16599 installed via the network.</p>
16600
16601 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
16602 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
16603 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
16604
16605 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16606
16607 <ul>
16608 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
16609 <ul>
16610 <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
16611 <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
16612 (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
16613 manual.)</li>
16614 <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
16615 <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
16616 <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
16617 <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
16618 <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
16619 <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
16620 <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
16621 <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
16622 <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
16623 <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
16624 <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
16625 <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
16626 <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
16627 manual</a> for more details.</li>
16628 <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
16629 installation.</li>
16630 <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
16631 <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>
16632 </ul></li>
16633 </ul>
16634
16635 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
16636 <ul>
16637 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
16638 German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
16639 for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
16640 </ul>
16641
16642 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
16643 <ul>
16644 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
16645 choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
16646 server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
16647 </ul>
16648
16649 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16650 <ul>
16651 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
16652 configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
16653 entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
16654 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
16655 functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
16656 completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
16657 </ul>
16658
16659 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
16660 <ul>
16661 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
16662 yet.</li>
16663 </ul>
16664
16665 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
16666
16667 <ul>
16668 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
16669 screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
16670 had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
16671 </ul>
16672
16673 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16674
16675 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
16676 <ul>
16677 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
16678 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
16679 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
16680 </ul>
16681
16682 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
16683
16684 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
16685
16686 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16687
16688 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
16689
16690 </div>
16691 <div class="tags">
16692
16693
16694 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16695
16696
16697 </div>
16698 </div>
16699 <div class="padding"></div>
16700
16701 <div class="entry">
16702 <div class="title">
16703 <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>
16704 </div>
16705 <div class="date">
16706 16th April 2013
16707 </div>
16708 <div class="body">
16709 <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
16710 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
16711 Details about the gathering can be found
16712 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
16713 the FRiSK wiki</a>. The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
16714 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
16715 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
16716 weekend.</p>
16717
16718 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
16719 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
16720 Edu release.</p>
16721
16722 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
16723
16724 </div>
16725 <div class="tags">
16726
16727
16728 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16729
16730
16731 </div>
16732 </div>
16733 <div class="padding"></div>
16734
16735 <div class="entry">
16736 <div class="title">
16737 <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>
16738 </div>
16739 <div class="date">
16740 3rd April 2013
16741 </div>
16742 <div class="body">
16743 <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
16744 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
16745 for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
16746 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
16747
16748 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
16749 install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop
16750 up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
16751 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
16752 the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
16753 BTS. :)</p>
16754
16755 </div>
16756 <div class="tags">
16757
16758
16759 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
16760
16761
16762 </div>
16763 </div>
16764 <div class="padding"></div>
16765
16766 <div class="entry">
16767 <div class="title">
16768 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
16769 </div>
16770 <div class="date">
16771 26th March 2013
16772 </div>
16773 <div class="body">
16774 <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
16775 time, without much sacrifice? A small step could be to change the
16776 font you use when printing.</p>
16777
16778 <p>Three years ago,
16779 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
16780 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
16781 changed their default front from
16782 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
16783 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
16784 Gothic</a> to save money. The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
16785 than Arial to print the same text. In other word, you could cut your
16786 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
16787 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
16788 prints.</p>
16789
16790 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
16791 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
16792 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
16793 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
16794 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
16795 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font. Not
16796 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
16797 sources will most likely still use a different font. Also, the
16798 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
16799 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
16800 depend on the documents printed.</p>
16801
16802 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
16803 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
16804 and save some money in the process.</p>
16805
16806 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
16807 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
16808 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
16809 difference between font pairs</a>. They also
16810 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
16811 which fonts to use</a> to save ink. Check it out. :) While updating
16812 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
16813 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
16814 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
16815
16816 </div>
16817 <div class="tags">
16818
16819
16820 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16821
16822
16823 </div>
16824 </div>
16825 <div class="padding"></div>
16826
16827 <div class="entry">
16828 <div class="title">
16829 <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>
16830 </div>
16831 <div class="date">
16832 24th March 2013
16833 </div>
16834 <div class="body">
16835 <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
16836 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
16837 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
16838 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
16839 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
16840 came up. The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
16841 easily available for current and future generations. Some of the
16842 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
16843 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
16844 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
16845 Commons</a> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
16846 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
16847
16848 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
16849 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
16850 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
16851 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
16852 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story. The tools to
16853 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
16854 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
16855 all I had to do was to use the
16856 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
16857 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
16858 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
16859 conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
16860 xsltproc/fop (aka
16861 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
16862 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
16863 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
16864 technical detail.</p>
16865
16866 <p>There were a few challenges, of course. We want to typeset the
16867 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
16868 control over the layout. The original short story have three
16869 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
16870 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
16871 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
16872
16873 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
16874 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
16875 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted. This did not look too
16876 good without the centring. The next approach was to create a new
16877 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
16878 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
16879 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
16880 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
16881 switched at this time). The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
16882
16883 <p><blockquote><pre>
16884 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16885 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16886 &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
16887 &lt;hr/&gt;
16888 &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16889 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16890 </pre></blockquote></p>
16891
16892 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
16893
16894 <p><blockquote><pre>
16895 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16896 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16897 &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
16898 &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
16899 &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
16900 &lt;/fo:block&gt;
16901 &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16902 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16903 </pre></blockquote></p>
16904
16905 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
16906 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
16907 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;. It isn't centred, but we
16908 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
16909 enough.</p>
16910
16911 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
16912 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
16913 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
16914 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF. I suspect there are better ways to do
16915 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github. The HTML XSL file now
16916 look like this:</p>
16917
16918 <p><blockquote><pre>
16919 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16920 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16921 &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
16922 &lt;br/&gt;
16923 &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16924 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16925 </pre></blockquote></p>
16926
16927 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
16928
16929 <p><blockquote><pre>
16930 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16931 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
16932 xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
16933 &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
16934 &lt;fo:block/&gt;
16935 &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16936 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16937 </pre></blockquote></p>
16938
16939 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
16940 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
16941 structure in the DocBook source. No idea how to do this, so we ended
16942 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
16943 page.</p>
16944
16945 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
16946 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
16947 github</a>
16948 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
16949 repository</a>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
16950 days.</p>
16951
16952 </div>
16953 <div class="tags">
16954
16955
16956 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>.
16957
16958
16959 </div>
16960 </div>
16961 <div class="padding"></div>
16962
16963 <div class="entry">
16964 <div class="title">
16965 <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>
16966 </div>
16967 <div class="date">
16968 17th March 2013
16969 </div>
16970 <div class="body">
16971 <p>Via
16972 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
16973 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
16974 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
16975 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
16976 / Debian Edu</a> version 6. He installed the standalone profile and
16977 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
16978 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
16979
16980 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
16981 have heard wrong). While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
16982
16983 <blockquote>
16984 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
16985 </blockquote>
16986
16987 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
16988
16989 <blockquote>
16990 "So, yeah, a bit bloated. It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
16991 to keep it nice and GNU. So, I do not want to go on about it, but
16992 lets give it 7 out of 10. I am not going to use it. That is because
16993 I am not deploying a school network. There may be some mythical
16994 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
16995 </blockquote>
16996
16997 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
16998 installation option. It make it possible to install only the main
16999 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
17000 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
17001
17002 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
17003 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
17004
17005 <blockquote>
17006 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
17007 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
17008 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
17009 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
17010 </blockquote>
17011
17012 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
17013 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
17014 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
17015 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
17016 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
17017
17018 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
17019 embedding:</p>
17020
17021 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
17022
17023 </div>
17024 <div class="tags">
17025
17026
17027 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17028
17029
17030 </div>
17031 </div>
17032 <div class="padding"></div>
17033
17034 <div class="entry">
17035 <div class="title">
17036 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
17037 </div>
17038 <div class="date">
17039 8th March 2013
17040 </div>
17041 <div class="body">
17042 <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
17043 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
17044 based on Debian Squeeze. This is the first update since
17045 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
17046 initial release 2012-03-11</a>. This is the
17047 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
17048 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
17049
17050 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
17051
17052 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
17053 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
17054
17055 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
17056 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
17057 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
17058 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes. Please see
17059 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
17060 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
17061
17062 <p>Images are available for download at
17063 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
17064
17065 <p>md5sums:
17066 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
17067 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
17068 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
17069
17070 <p>sha1sums:
17071 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3 debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
17072 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
17073 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
17074
17075 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
17076
17077 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
17078 2013-03-03:</p>
17079
17080 <ul>
17081 <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
17082 <ul>
17083 <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
17084 <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
17085 </ul></li>
17086 <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
17087 <ul>
17088 <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
17089 <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
17090 </ul></li>
17091 <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
17092 <ul>
17093 <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
17094 <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
17095 <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
17096 Closes: #664596</li>
17097 <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
17098 Closes: #664976</li>
17099 <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
17100 <ul>
17101 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
17102 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
17103 </ul></li>
17104 <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
17105 <ul>
17106 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
17107 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
17108 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
17109 "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
17110 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
17111 </ul></li>
17112 <li>Add Danish web page</li>
17113 </ul>
17114 <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
17115 <ul>
17116 <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
17117 </ul></li>
17118 </ul>
17119
17120 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
17121 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
17122 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
17123 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
17124
17125 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
17126 mailinglist
17127 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
17128 </p></blockquote>
17129
17130 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
17131
17132 </div>
17133 <div class="tags">
17134
17135
17136 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17137
17138
17139 </div>
17140 </div>
17141 <div class="padding"></div>
17142
17143 <div class="entry">
17144 <div class="title">
17145 <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>
17146 </div>
17147 <div class="date">
17148 3rd March 2013
17149 </div>
17150 <div class="body">
17151 <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
17152 broadcast them on the air? Using free software? With video on demand
17153 support using
17154 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
17155 open standards</a>? Included a web based video stream as well? And
17156 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world? A
17157 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
17158 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
17159 system to do just this. The source code for the solution is licensed
17160 using the GNU LGPL, and
17161 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
17162
17163 <p>The idea is simple. You upload a video file over the web, and
17164 attach meta information to the file. You select a time slot in the
17165 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
17166 in the web stream. It is also made available in a video on demand
17167 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time. All
17168 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
17169
17170 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution. I'll mention
17171 the three most important ones. The first part is the database of
17172 videos and the schedule. This is written in Django and include a REST
17173 API. The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
17174 PostgreSQL. At the moment this system can be tested on
17175 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>. The
17176 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
17177 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast. This is done
17178 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
17179 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>. Video
17180 signal distribution is handled using
17181 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>. The
17182 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
17183 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
17184 on demand. It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
17185 decided what it will end up using. Note that the source of the latter
17186 two parts are not yet pushed to github. The lead author want to clean
17187 them up a bit more first.</p>
17188
17189 <p>The development is coordinated on the
17190 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
17191 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
17192 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
17193 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
17194 (phed on IRC). Anyone is welcome to participate in the
17195 development.</p>
17196
17197 </div>
17198 <div class="tags">
17199
17200
17201 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>.
17202
17203
17204 </div>
17205 </div>
17206 <div class="padding"></div>
17207
17208 <div class="entry">
17209 <div class="title">
17210 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
17211 </div>
17212 <div class="date">
17213 27th February 2013
17214 </div>
17215 <div class="body">
17216 <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
17217 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
17218 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
17219 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>. The event is public
17220 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
17221 (where I am the chair of the board) and
17222 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
17223 Center</a>. The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
17224 GNU», with this description:
17225
17226 <p><blockquote>
17227 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
17228 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
17229 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
17230 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
17231 </blockquote></p>
17232
17233 <p>The meeting is open for everyone. Due to space limitations, the
17234 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45. I
17235 am really curious how many will show up. See
17236 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
17237 page</a> for the location details.</p>
17238
17239 </div>
17240 <div class="tags">
17241
17242
17243 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>.
17244
17245
17246 </div>
17247 </div>
17248 <div class="padding"></div>
17249
17250 <div class="entry">
17251 <div class="title">
17252 <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>
17253 </div>
17254 <div class="date">
17255 15th February 2013
17256 </div>
17257 <div class="body">
17258 <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
17259 now a great source of free maps available from
17260 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>. To
17261 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
17262 download the map type you want. There are 8 different maps available,
17263 using different colours and data selection. Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
17264 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
17265 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
17266 page for descriptions).</p>
17267
17268 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
17269 map you can just edit the
17270 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
17271 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
17272
17273 </div>
17274 <div class="tags">
17275
17276
17277 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>.
17278
17279
17280 </div>
17281 </div>
17282 <div class="padding"></div>
17283
17284 <div class="entry">
17285 <div class="title">
17286 <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>
17287 </div>
17288 <div class="date">
17289 12th February 2013
17290 </div>
17291 <div class="body">
17292 <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
17293 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
17294 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
17295 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
17296 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
17297 facilitators. This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
17298 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers. My preferred
17299 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
17300 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
17301 protocol like REST or SOAP. But this might also be overkill, as the
17302 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
17303 using a simple bar code. My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
17304 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there. The
17305 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
17306 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
17307 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
17308
17309 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
17310 information can be included using such extentions. For example an
17311 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
17312 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
17313 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
17314 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
17315 fields:</p>
17316
17317 <p><pre>
17318 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
17319 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
17320 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
17321 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
17322 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
17323 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
17324 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
17325 </pre></p>
17326
17327 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
17328 answer regarding
17329 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
17330 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>. For payments in
17331 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
17332 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
17333
17334 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
17335
17336 <p><pre>
17337 BEGIN:VCARD
17338 VERSION:2.1
17339 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
17340 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
17341 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
17342 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
17343 REV:20130212T095000Z
17344 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
17345 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
17346 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
17347 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
17348 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
17349 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
17350 END:VCARD
17351 </pre></p>
17352
17353 <p>The resulting QR code created using
17354 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
17355 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
17356 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
17357 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
17358 system.</p>
17359
17360 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
17361
17362 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
17363 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
17364 handling invoices. I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
17365 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
17366
17367 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
17368 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
17369
17370 </div>
17371 <div class="tags">
17372
17373
17374 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>.
17375
17376
17377 </div>
17378 </div>
17379 <div class="padding"></div>
17380
17381 <div class="entry">
17382 <div class="title">
17383 <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>
17384 </div>
17385 <div class="date">
17386 10th February 2013
17387 </div>
17388 <div class="body">
17389 <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
17390
17391 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
17392 during the night and wake up when it is morning. I mean, when I
17393 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier. In our household we
17394 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
17395 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day. They have adapted
17396 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
17397 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
17398 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
17399 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
17400 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
17401 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
17402
17403 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem. It
17404 involve home automation. A few years ago I bought a
17405 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
17406 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
17407 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
17408 gadgets using my Linux server. When I moved from the old flat to a
17409 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
17410 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
17411 the gadgets I had. But recently I bought a
17412 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
17413 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
17414 sockets. I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
17415 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding. The default
17416 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
17417 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
17418 ones own
17419 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
17420 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
17421 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
17422 code. I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
17423 important. But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
17424 the kids came to me yesterday. We can set up a night light controlled
17425 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00. The kids can
17426 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
17427 get up or not. They joined me in setting everything up, and I
17428 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
17429 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
17430
17431 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
17432 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
17433 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
17434 arrived. So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
17435 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
17436 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
17437
17438 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
17439 to tell the kids to get up. We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
17440 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
17441
17442 </div>
17443 <div class="tags">
17444
17445
17446 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17447
17448
17449 </div>
17450 </div>
17451 <div class="padding"></div>
17452
17453 <div class="entry">
17454 <div class="title">
17455 <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>
17456 </div>
17457 <div class="date">
17458 2nd February 2013
17459 </div>
17460 <div class="body">
17461 <p>My
17462 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
17463 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
17464 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
17465 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
17466 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
17467 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
17468 version too.</p>
17469
17470 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
17471 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
17472 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
17473 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
17474 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
17475 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
17476 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
17477 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
17478
17479 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
17480 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
17481 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
17482 #696715</a>). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
17483 it. :)</p>
17484
17485 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
17486 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
17487 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
17488
17489 </div>
17490 <div class="tags">
17491
17492
17493 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>.
17494
17495
17496 </div>
17497 </div>
17498 <div class="padding"></div>
17499
17500 <div class="entry">
17501 <div class="title">
17502 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
17503 </div>
17504 <div class="date">
17505 22nd January 2013
17506 </div>
17507 <div class="body">
17508 <p>Yesterday, I
17509 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
17510 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
17511 pluggable hardware devices, which I
17512 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
17513 out to create</a> earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
17514 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
17515 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
17516 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
17517 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
17518 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
17519 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
17520 repository in Debian. The new name? It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
17521 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
17522
17523 <pre>
17524 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
17525 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
17526 </pre>
17527
17528 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
17529 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
17530 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
17531 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
17532
17533 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
17534 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
17535 stuff, in other words. I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
17536 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
17537 word.</p>
17538
17539 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
17540 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
17541 process.</p>
17542
17543 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
17544 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
17545
17546 </div>
17547 <div class="tags">
17548
17549
17550 Tags: <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>.
17551
17552
17553 </div>
17554 </div>
17555 <div class="padding"></div>
17556
17557 <div class="entry">
17558 <div class="title">
17559 <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>
17560 </div>
17561 <div class="date">
17562 21st January 2013
17563 </div>
17564 <div class="body">
17565 <p>Early this month I set out to try to
17566 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
17567 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>. Now my
17568 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
17569 it, fetch the
17570 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
17571 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
17572 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
17573 autostart script.</p>
17574
17575 <p>The design is simple:</p>
17576
17577 <ul>
17578
17579 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
17580 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
17581
17582 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
17583 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
17584 initially did.</li>
17585
17586 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
17587 the APT database, a database
17588 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
17589 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
17590
17591 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
17592 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
17593 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
17594 package or packages.</li>
17595
17596 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
17597 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
17598
17599 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
17600 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
17601
17602 </ul>
17603
17604 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
17605 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
17606 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
17607 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
17608
17609 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
17610 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
17611 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
17612 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
17613 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
17614
17615 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
17616 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
17617 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
17618 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
17619 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
17620 method. I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
17621 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
17622 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
17623
17624 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
17625 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
17626 '<tt>svn checkout
17627 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
17628 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'. If you lack debuild, install the
17629 devscripts package.</p>
17630
17631 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
17632 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
17633 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
17634 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
17635 instructions</a> for details.</p>
17636
17637 </div>
17638 <div class="tags">
17639
17640
17641 Tags: <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>.
17642
17643
17644 </div>
17645 </div>
17646 <div class="padding"></div>
17647
17648 <div class="entry">
17649 <div class="title">
17650 <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>
17651 </div>
17652 <div class="date">
17653 19th January 2013
17654 </div>
17655 <div class="body">
17656 <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
17657 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
17658 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
17659 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
17660 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
17661 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
17662 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
17663 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
17664 not a durable solution.
17665
17666 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
17667 got a new one more than 10 years ago. It still holds true.:)</p>
17668
17669 <ul>
17670
17671 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
17672 than A4).</li>
17673 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
17674 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
17675 <li>Long battery life time. Preferable a week.</li>
17676 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
17677 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
17678 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
17679 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
17680 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
17681 size).</li>
17682 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
17683 X.org packages.</li>
17684 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
17685 the time).
17686
17687 </ul>
17688
17689 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
17690 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
17691 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
17692 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
17693 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
17694 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
17695 Lenovo took over. But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
17696 still be useful.</p>
17697
17698 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
17699 external keyboard? I'll have to check the
17700 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
17701 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
17702 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
17703 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
17704
17705 </div>
17706 <div class="tags">
17707
17708
17709 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17710
17711
17712 </div>
17713 </div>
17714 <div class="padding"></div>
17715
17716 <div class="entry">
17717 <div class="title">
17718 <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>
17719 </div>
17720 <div class="date">
17721 18th January 2013
17722 </div>
17723 <div class="body">
17724 <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
17725 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
17726 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
17727 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
17728 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
17729 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
17730 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
17731
17732 <pre>
17733 #!/usr/bin/python
17734 import sys
17735 import apt
17736 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
17737 cache = apt.Cache()
17738 cache.open(None)
17739 thepkgs = []
17740 for pkg in cache:
17741 version = pkg.candidate
17742 if version is None:
17743 version = pkg.installed
17744 if version is None:
17745 continue
17746 record = version.record
17747 if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
17748 continue
17749 mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
17750 for t in mime_types:
17751 t = t.rstrip().strip()
17752 if t == mimetype:
17753 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
17754 return thepkgs
17755 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
17756 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
17757 mimetype = sys.argv[1]
17758 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
17759 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
17760 print " %s" %pkg
17761 </pre>
17762
17763 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
17764
17765 <pre>
17766 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
17767 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
17768 gecko-mediaplayer
17769 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
17770 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
17771 browser-plugin-gnash
17772 %
17773 </pre>
17774
17775 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
17776 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
17777 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
17778 anyone working on adding it?</p>
17779
17780 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
17781 request for icweasel support for this feature is
17782 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
17783 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today). Lack
17784 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
17785 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
17786
17787 </div>
17788 <div class="tags">
17789
17790
17791 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17792
17793
17794 </div>
17795 </div>
17796 <div class="padding"></div>
17797
17798 <div class="entry">
17799 <div class="title">
17800 <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>
17801 </div>
17802 <div class="date">
17803 16th January 2013
17804 </div>
17805 <div class="body">
17806 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
17807 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
17808 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
17809 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
17810 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
17811 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
17812 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
17813 downloaded by the browser.</p>
17814
17815 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
17816 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
17817 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
17818 can be found on the
17819 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
17820 site</a>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
17821 answer the question in the title. Here are the 20 most supported MIME
17822 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
17823 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
17824
17825 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
17826
17827 <pre>
17828 count MIME type
17829 ----- -----------------------
17830 32 text/plain
17831 30 audio/mpeg
17832 29 image/png
17833 28 image/jpeg
17834 27 application/ogg
17835 26 audio/x-mp3
17836 25 image/tiff
17837 25 image/gif
17838 22 image/bmp
17839 22 audio/x-wav
17840 20 audio/x-flac
17841 19 audio/x-mpegurl
17842 18 video/x-ms-asf
17843 18 audio/x-musepack
17844 18 audio/x-mpeg
17845 18 application/x-ogg
17846 17 video/mpeg
17847 17 audio/x-scpls
17848 17 audio/ogg
17849 16 video/x-ms-wmv
17850 </pre>
17851
17852 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
17853
17854 <pre>
17855 count MIME type
17856 ----- -----------------------
17857 33 text/plain
17858 32 image/png
17859 32 image/jpeg
17860 29 audio/mpeg
17861 27 image/gif
17862 26 image/tiff
17863 26 application/ogg
17864 25 audio/x-mp3
17865 22 image/bmp
17866 21 audio/x-wav
17867 19 audio/x-mpegurl
17868 19 audio/x-mpeg
17869 18 video/mpeg
17870 18 audio/x-scpls
17871 18 audio/x-flac
17872 18 application/x-ogg
17873 17 video/x-ms-asf
17874 17 text/html
17875 17 audio/x-musepack
17876 16 image/x-xbitmap
17877 </pre>
17878
17879 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
17880
17881 <pre>
17882 count MIME type
17883 ----- -----------------------
17884 31 text/plain
17885 31 image/png
17886 31 image/jpeg
17887 29 audio/mpeg
17888 28 application/ogg
17889 27 image/gif
17890 26 image/tiff
17891 26 audio/x-mp3
17892 23 audio/x-wav
17893 22 image/bmp
17894 21 audio/x-flac
17895 20 audio/x-mpegurl
17896 19 audio/x-mpeg
17897 18 video/x-ms-asf
17898 18 video/mpeg
17899 18 audio/x-scpls
17900 18 application/x-ogg
17901 17 audio/x-musepack
17902 16 video/x-ms-wmv
17903 16 video/x-msvideo
17904 </pre>
17905
17906 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
17907 information mentioned in DEP-11. I have not yet had time to look at
17908 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
17909 issues.</p>
17910
17911 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
17912 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
17913
17914 </div>
17915 <div class="tags">
17916
17917
17918 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17919
17920
17921 </div>
17922 </div>
17923 <div class="padding"></div>
17924
17925 <div class="entry">
17926 <div class="title">
17927 <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>
17928 </div>
17929 <div class="date">
17930 15th January 2013
17931 </div>
17932 <div class="body">
17933 <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
17934 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
17935 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
17936 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
17937 dongle support in Debian</a>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
17938 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
17939 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
17940 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
17941 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
17942 packages.</p>
17943
17944 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
17945 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
17946 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
17947 modalias.</p>
17948
17949 <p><blockquote>
17950 Package: package-name
17951 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
17952 </blockquote></p>
17953
17954 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
17955 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
17956
17957 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
17958 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
17959
17960 <p><blockquote>
17961 Package: cheese
17962 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
17963 </blockquote></p>
17964
17965 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
17966 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
17967
17968 <p><blockquote>
17969 Package: pcmciautils
17970 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
17971 </blockquote></p>
17972
17973 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
17974 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
17975
17976 <p><blockquote>
17977 Package: colorhug-client
17978 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
17979 </blockquote></p>
17980
17981 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
17982 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
17983 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
17984
17985 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
17986 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
17987 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
17988 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
17989 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I've
17990 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
17991 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
17992 Raring.</p>
17993
17994 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
17995 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
17996 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
17997 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
17998 try the
17999 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
18000 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
18001 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
18002 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
18003
18004 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
18005 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
18006
18007 <p><blockquote>
18008 % ./hw-support-lookup
18009 <br>yubikey-personalization
18010 <br>%
18011 </blockquote></p>
18012
18013 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
18014 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
18015
18016 <p><blockquote>
18017 % ./hw-support-lookup
18018 <br>pcmciautils
18019 <br>%
18020 </blockquote></p>
18021
18022 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
18023 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
18024 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
18025
18026 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
18027 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
18028 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
18029 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
18030 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
18031 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
18032 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
18033 see if it work.</p>
18034
18035 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
18036 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
18037 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
18038 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
18039
18040 </div>
18041 <div class="tags">
18042
18043
18044 Tags: <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>.
18045
18046
18047 </div>
18048 </div>
18049 <div class="padding"></div>
18050
18051 <div class="entry">
18052 <div class="title">
18053 <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>
18054 </div>
18055 <div class="date">
18056 14th January 2013
18057 </div>
18058 <div class="body">
18059 <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
18060 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
18061 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
18062 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
18063 in
18064 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
18065 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
18066
18067 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
18068
18069 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
18070 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
18071 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
18072 &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;,
18073 &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
18074 &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;.
18075
18076 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
18077 this shell script:</p>
18078
18079 <pre>
18080 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
18081 </pre>
18082
18083 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
18084 using modinfo:</p>
18085
18086 <pre>
18087 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
18088 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
18089 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
18090 %
18091 </pre>
18092
18093 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
18094
18095 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
18096 Bridge memory controller:</p>
18097
18098 <p><blockquote>
18099 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
18100 </blockquote></p>
18101
18102 <p>This represent these values:</p>
18103
18104 <pre>
18105 v 00008086 (vendor)
18106 d 00002770 (device)
18107 sv 00001028 (subvendor)
18108 sd 000001AD (subdevice)
18109 bc 06 (bus class)
18110 sc 00 (bus subclass)
18111 i 00 (interface)
18112 </pre>
18113
18114 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
18115 -n' as 8086:2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
18116 0600. The 0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
18117 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
18118
18119 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
18120 means.</p>
18121
18122 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
18123
18124 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
18125 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
18126
18127 <p><blockquote>
18128 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
18129 </blockquote></p>
18130
18131 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
18132
18133 <pre>
18134 v 1D6B (device vendor)
18135 p 0001 (device product)
18136 d 0206 (bcddevice)
18137 dc 09 (device class)
18138 dsc 00 (device subclass)
18139 dp 00 (device protocol)
18140 ic 09 (interface class)
18141 isc 00 (interface subclass)
18142 ip 00 (interface protocol)
18143 </pre>
18144
18145 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
18146 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
18147 these alias entries show up:</p>
18148
18149 <p><blockquote>
18150 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
18151 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
18152 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
18153 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
18154 </blockquote></p>
18155
18156 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
18157 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
18158 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
18159
18160 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
18161
18162 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
18163 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
18164
18165 <p><blockquote>
18166 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
18167 </blockquote></p>
18168
18169 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
18170
18171 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
18172
18173 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
18174 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
18175 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
18176
18177 <p><blockquote>
18178 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
18179 </blockquote></p>
18180
18181 <p>The values present are</p>
18182
18183 <pre>
18184 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
18185 bvr 1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
18186 bd 06/15/2005 (BIOS date)
18187 svn IBM (system vendor)
18188 pn 2371H4G (product name)
18189 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
18190 rvn IBM (board vendor)
18191 rn 2371H4G (board name)
18192 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
18193 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
18194 ct 10 (chassis type)
18195 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
18196 </pre>
18197
18198 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
18199 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
18200
18201 <pre>
18202 3 Desktop
18203 4 Low Profile Desktop
18204 5 Pizza Box
18205 6 Mini Tower
18206 7 Tower
18207 8 Portable
18208 9 Laptop
18209 10 Notebook
18210 11 Hand Held
18211 12 Docking Station
18212 13 All In One
18213 14 Sub Notebook
18214 15 Space-saving
18215 16 Lunch Box
18216 17 Main Server Chassis
18217 18 Expansion Chassis
18218 19 Sub Chassis
18219 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
18220 21 Peripheral Chassis
18221 22 RAID Chassis
18222 23 Rack Mount Chassis
18223 24 Sealed-case PC
18224 25 Multi-system
18225 26 CompactPCI
18226 27 AdvancedTCA
18227 28 Blade
18228 29 Blade Enclosing
18229 </pre>
18230
18231 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
18232 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
18233 claim it is a desktop.</p>
18234
18235 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
18236
18237 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
18238 test machine:</p>
18239
18240 <p><blockquote>
18241 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
18242 </blockquote></p>
18243
18244 <p>The values present are</p>
18245
18246 <pre>
18247 ty 01 (type)
18248 pr 00 (prototype)
18249 id 00 (id)
18250 ex 00 (extra)
18251 </pre>
18252
18253 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
18254 the valid values are.</p>
18255
18256 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
18257
18258 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
18259 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
18260 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
18261 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
18262 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
18263 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
18264 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
18265
18266 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
18267
18268 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
18269 one can use the following shell script:</p>
18270
18271 <pre>
18272 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
18273 echo "$id" ; \
18274 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/ /' ; \
18275 done
18276 </pre>
18277
18278 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
18279 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
18280
18281 <pre>
18282 acpi:ACPI0003:
18283 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
18284 acpi:device:
18285 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
18286 acpi:IBM0068:
18287 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
18288 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
18289 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
18290 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
18291 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
18292 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
18293 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
18294 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
18295 [...]
18296 </pre>
18297
18298 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
18299 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
18300 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
18301 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
18302
18303 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
18304 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
18305 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
18306
18307 </div>
18308 <div class="tags">
18309
18310
18311 Tags: <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>.
18312
18313
18314 </div>
18315 </div>
18316 <div class="padding"></div>
18317
18318 <div class="entry">
18319 <div class="title">
18320 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
18321 </div>
18322 <div class="date">
18323 10th January 2013
18324 </div>
18325 <div class="body">
18326 <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
18327 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
18328 Launcher and updated the Debian package
18329 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
18330 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
18331 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
18332 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
18333 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
18334 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
18335 contribute. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
18336 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
18337 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
18338 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
18339 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
18340 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
18341 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
18342 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
18343 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
18344
18345 </div>
18346 <div class="tags">
18347
18348
18349 Tags: <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>.
18350
18351
18352 </div>
18353 </div>
18354 <div class="padding"></div>
18355
18356 <div class="entry">
18357 <div class="title">
18358 <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>
18359 </div>
18360 <div class="date">
18361 9th January 2013
18362 </div>
18363 <div class="body">
18364 <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
18365 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
18366 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
18367 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
18368 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
18369 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
18370 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
18371 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
18372 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
18373 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
18374 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
18375
18376 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
18377 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
18378 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
18379 simple:
18380
18381 <ul>
18382
18383 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
18384 starting when a user log in.</li>
18385
18386 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
18387 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
18388
18389 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
18390 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
18391 packages.</li>
18392
18393 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
18394 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
18395
18396 </ul>
18397
18398 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
18399 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
18400 discover database to find packages and
18401 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
18402 packages.</p>
18403
18404 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
18405 draft package is now checked into
18406 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
18407 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
18408 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
18409 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
18410 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
18411 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
18412 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
18413 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
18414 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
18415 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
18416 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
18417 because of the freeze).</p>
18418
18419 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
18420 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
18421 inserted):</p>
18422
18423 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
18424
18425 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
18426 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
18427 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
18428
18429 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
18430 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
18431 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
18432 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
18433 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
18434 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
18435 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
18436
18437 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
18438 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
18439 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
18440 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
18441 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
18442 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
18443 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
18444 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
18445 not be installed?</p>
18446
18447 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
18448 please send me an email. :)</p>
18449
18450 </div>
18451 <div class="tags">
18452
18453
18454 Tags: <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>.
18455
18456
18457 </div>
18458 </div>
18459 <div class="padding"></div>
18460
18461 <div class="entry">
18462 <div class="title">
18463 <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>
18464 </div>
18465 <div class="date">
18466 2nd January 2013
18467 </div>
18468 <div class="body">
18469 <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
18470 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
18471 NXT</a>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
18472 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
18473 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
18474 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
18475 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
18476 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
18477 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
18478 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
18479
18480 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
18481 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
18482 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
18483
18484 </div>
18485 <div class="tags">
18486
18487
18488 Tags: <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>.
18489
18490
18491 </div>
18492 </div>
18493 <div class="padding"></div>
18494
18495 <div class="entry">
18496 <div class="title">
18497 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
18498 </div>
18499 <div class="date">
18500 28th December 2012
18501 </div>
18502 <div class="body">
18503 <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
18504 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
18505 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
18506 Agency in Trondheim. NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
18507 December 24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
18508 present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
18509 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
18510 gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
18511 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
18512 development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
18513 followed by many others. :)</p>
18514
18515 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
18516 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
18517 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
18518 you want to donate to the project.</p>
18519
18520 </div>
18521 <div class="tags">
18522
18523
18524 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18525
18526
18527 </div>
18528 </div>
18529 <div class="padding"></div>
18530
18531 <div class="entry">
18532 <div class="title">
18533 <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>
18534 </div>
18535 <div class="date">
18536 25th December 2012
18537 </div>
18538 <div class="body">
18539 <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
18540 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
18541
18542 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
18543 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
18544 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
18545 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
18546 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
18547 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
18548 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
18549 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
18550 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
18551 name.</p>
18552
18553 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
18554 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
18555 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
18556
18557 <blockquote><pre>
18558 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
18559 cd bitcoin
18560 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
18561 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
18562 </pre></blockquote>
18563
18564 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
18565 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
18566 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
18567 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
18568 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
18569 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
18570 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
18571 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
18572 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
18573
18574 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
18575 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
18576 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
18577
18578 </div>
18579 <div class="tags">
18580
18581
18582 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>.
18583
18584
18585 </div>
18586 </div>
18587 <div class="padding"></div>
18588
18589 <div class="entry">
18590 <div class="title">
18591 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
18592 </div>
18593 <div class="date">
18594 21st December 2012
18595 </div>
18596 <div class="body">
18597 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
18598 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
18599 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
18600 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
18601 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
18602 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
18603 is now maintained by a
18604 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
18605 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
18606 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
18607 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
18608 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
18609 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
18610 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
18611 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
18612 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
18613 Corallo in a
18614 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
18615 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
18616 Debian package.</p>
18617
18618 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
18619 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
18620 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
18621 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
18622 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
18623 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
18624 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
18625 patch to backport</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
18626 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
18627 new version to unstable.
18628
18629 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
18630 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
18631 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
18632 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
18633 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
18634 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
18635 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
18636 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
18637 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
18638 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
18639 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
18640 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
18641 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
18642 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
18643 have not tested them.</p>
18644
18645 <p>My
18646 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
18647 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
18648 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
18649 years ago, as can be
18650 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
18651 on the blockexplorer service</a>. Thank you everyone for your
18652 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
18653 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
18654 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
18655 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
18656 the same address as last time,
18657 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
18658
18659 </div>
18660 <div class="tags">
18661
18662
18663 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>.
18664
18665
18666 </div>
18667 </div>
18668 <div class="padding"></div>
18669
18670 <div class="entry">
18671 <div class="title">
18672 <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>
18673 </div>
18674 <div class="date">
18675 18th December 2012
18676 </div>
18677 <div class="body">
18678 <p>A few days ago I came across
18679 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
18680 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
18681 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
18682 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
18683 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
18684 the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
18685 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
18686 the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
18687 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
18688
18689 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
18690 different implementations</a> able to read the format. An example
18691 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
18692 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
18693
18694 <blockquote><pre>
18695 2004-05-27 Book Store
18696 Expenses:Books $20.00
18697 Liabilities:Visa
18698 </pre></blockquote>
18699
18700 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
18701 look for others using it. I found blog posts from
18702 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
18703 Spang</a>,
18704 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
18705 Keen</a>,
18706 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
18707 Cantino</a> and
18708 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
18709 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
18710 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
18711 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
18712 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
18713
18714 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
18715 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
18716 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
18717 package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
18718 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
18719
18720 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
18721 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
18722 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
18723 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
18724 play with the data set. I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
18725 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
18726 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command. But I will have to
18727 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
18728 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
18729
18730 </div>
18731 <div class="tags">
18732
18733
18734 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18735
18736
18737 </div>
18738 </div>
18739 <div class="padding"></div>
18740
18741 <div class="entry">
18742 <div class="title">
18743 <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>
18744 </div>
18745 <div class="date">
18746 6th December 2012
18747 </div>
18748 <div class="body">
18749 <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
18750 Oslo</a>, we use the
18751 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
18752 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
18753 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
18754 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
18755 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
18756 always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
18757 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
18758 virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
18759 Python.</p>
18760
18761 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
18762 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
18763 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
18764 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
18765 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
18766 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
18767
18768 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
18769 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
18770 user currently logged in:</p>
18771
18772 <blockquote><pre>
18773 #!/usr/bin/env python
18774 import getpass
18775 import xmlrpclib
18776 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
18777 username = getpass.getuser()
18778 password = getpass.getpass()
18779 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
18780 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
18781 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
18782 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
18783 result = server.logout(sessionid)
18784 print result
18785 </pre></blockquote>
18786
18787 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
18788 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
18789
18790 </div>
18791 <div class="tags">
18792
18793
18794 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>.
18795
18796
18797 </div>
18798 </div>
18799 <div class="padding"></div>
18800
18801 <div class="entry">
18802 <div class="title">
18803 <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>
18804 </div>
18805 <div class="date">
18806 17th November 2012
18807 </div>
18808 <div class="body">
18809 <p>While working on a
18810 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
18811 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
18812 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
18813 creativity, one idea occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax
18814 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
18815 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
18816
18817 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
18818 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
18819 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
18820 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
18821 in writing for a wider audience. The idea is not really based on the
18822 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
18823 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
18824 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
18825 controlled by the citizens in a country. I'm sharing the idea here to
18826 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
18827 arguments.</p>
18828
18829 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in
18830 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
18831 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
18832 stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value
18833 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
18834 taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have
18835 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
18836 work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Why not?</p>
18837
18838 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
18839 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
18840 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
18841 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such
18842 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
18843 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
18844 hard operation with todays copyright law. To ensure that copyright
18845 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
18846 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
18847 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
18848 correct right holder.</p>
18849
18850 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
18851 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
18852 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
18853 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
18854 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
18855 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
18856 work. Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
18857 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
18858 tax calculation. I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
18859 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
18860 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain. The
18861 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
18862 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
18863 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
18864
18865 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
18866 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
18867 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.</p>
18868
18869 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet? I am sure the tax office
18870 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
18871
18872 </div>
18873 <div class="tags">
18874
18875
18876 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>.
18877
18878
18879 </div>
18880 </div>
18881 <div class="padding"></div>
18882
18883 <div class="entry">
18884 <div class="title">
18885 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
18886 </div>
18887 <div class="date">
18888 14th November 2012
18889 </div>
18890 <div class="body">
18891 <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
18892 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18893 community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
18894 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
18895 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
18896 the people behind the German
18897 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
18898 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
18899 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
18900
18901 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18902
18903 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
18904 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
18905 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
18906
18907 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
18908 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
18909 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
18910 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
18911 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
18912 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
18913
18914 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
18915 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
18916 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
18917 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
18918 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
18919 relationship management and the communication processes in the
18920 project.</p>
18921
18922 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
18923 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
18924 and a yoga teacher.</p>
18925
18926 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
18927 project?</strong></p>
18928
18929 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
18930
18931 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
18932 Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
18933 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
18934 their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
18935 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
18936 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
18937 teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
18938 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
18939 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
18940 parents.</p>
18941
18942 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
18943 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
18944 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
18945 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
18946 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
18947 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
18948 Germany.</p>
18949
18950 <p>For information about our school project you can read
18951 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
18952 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
18953
18954 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18955 Edu?</strong></p>
18956
18957 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
18958 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
18959
18960 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
18961 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
18962 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
18963 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
18964 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
18965 ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
18966 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
18967 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
18968 teachers, parents...</p>
18969
18970 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18971 Edu?</strong></p>
18972
18973 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
18974 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18975
18976 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
18977 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
18978 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
18979 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
18980 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18981
18982 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
18983 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
18984 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
18985 and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
18986 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
18987 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
18988 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18989
18990 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18991
18992 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
18993 on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
18994 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
18995 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
18996
18997 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18998 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18999
19000 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
19001 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
19002 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
19003 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
19004 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
19005
19006 <ul>
19007
19008 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
19009 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
19010 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
19011
19012 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
19013 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
19014 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
19015 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
19016 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
19017 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
19018 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
19019
19020 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
19021 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
19022 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
19023 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
19024
19025 </ul>
19026
19027 </div>
19028 <div class="tags">
19029
19030
19031 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19032
19033
19034 </div>
19035 </div>
19036 <div class="padding"></div>
19037
19038 <div class="entry">
19039 <div class="title">
19040 <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>
19041 </div>
19042 <div class="date">
19043 4th November 2012
19044 </div>
19045 <div class="body">
19046 <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
19047 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
19048 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
19049 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>. It is interesting to
19050 see how a member of the bitcoin community
19051 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
19052 the report</a>. As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
19053 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
19054 competition. My thoughts go to the
19055 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
19056 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
19057 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933. A successful
19058 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
19059 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
19060
19061 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
19062 that the community already seem to have
19063 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
19064 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>. Not very surprising, given
19065 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other. I guess
19066 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
19067 wealth is available.</p>
19068
19069 </div>
19070 <div class="tags">
19071
19072
19073 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>.
19074
19075
19076 </div>
19077 </div>
19078 <div class="padding"></div>
19079
19080 <div class="entry">
19081 <div class="title">
19082 <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>
19083 </div>
19084 <div class="date">
19085 26th October 2012
19086 </div>
19087 <div class="body">
19088 <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
19089 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
19090 all over the place. I am also a member (and currently leader) of
19091 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
19092 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>. NUUG
19093 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
19094 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
19095 is a US based member organisation with similar targets. And thanks to
19096 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
19097 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
19098 mail several times a year. The magazine is great, and I read most of
19099 it every time.</p>
19100
19101 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
19102 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
19103 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
19104 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
19105 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
19106 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
19107 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
19108 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
19109 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
19110 etc etc. The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
19111 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
19112 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
19113
19114 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
19115 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
19116 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
19117 assumtions on scope and user impact. Here is the two example from the
19118 article: First the unplanned outage:
19119
19120 <blockquote><pre>
19121 Subject: Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
19122 Severity: Critical (Unplanned)
19123 Start: Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
19124 End: Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
19125 Duration: 40 minutes
19126 Scope: Exchange 2003
19127 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
19128 a cluster failover.
19129
19130 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
19131 access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
19132 Technician: [xxx]
19133 </pre></blockquote>
19134
19135 Next the planned outage:
19136
19137 <blockquote><pre>
19138 Subject: H Building Switch Upgrades
19139 Severity: Major (Planned)
19140 Start: Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
19141 End: Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
19142 Duration: 10 hours
19143 Scope: H2 Transport
19144 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
19145 stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
19146 4510s.
19147 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
19148 this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
19149 connectivity.
19150 Technician: [xxx]
19151 </pre></blockquote>
19152
19153 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
19154 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
19155 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
19156 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
19157 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
19158 format listed above). There are also other issues with the format
19159 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
19160
19161 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
19162 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
19163 university too. We do register
19164 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
19165 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
19166 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
19167 report to the same location for unplanned outages. Perhaps something
19168 for other sites to consider too?</p>
19169
19170 </div>
19171 <div class="tags">
19172
19173
19174 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>.
19175
19176
19177 </div>
19178 </div>
19179 <div class="padding"></div>
19180
19181 <div class="entry">
19182 <div class="title">
19183 <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>
19184 </div>
19185 <div class="date">
19186 22nd October 2012
19187 </div>
19188 <div class="body">
19189 <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
19190 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
19191 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
19192 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>. If a real book store did
19193 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
19194 and theft. The story has spread around the net today. A bit more
19195 background information is available in Norwegian from
19196 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
19197 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
19198 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
19199 introduced many years back. And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
19200 willing to
19201 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
19202 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
19203 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
19204 customers who had bought it. From the official comments, it even
19205 sounded like
19206 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
19207 would never do that again</a>. And here we are, three years
19208 later.</p>
19209
19210 <p>And thought this action is
19211 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
19212 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
19213 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
19214 Norwegian laws. It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
19215 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
19216 rights.</p>
19217
19218 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
19219 unacceptable terms. For example
19220 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
19221 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
19222 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
19223 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
19224 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
19225
19226 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
19227 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
19228 restored the account of the user, as reported by
19229 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
19230 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
19231 Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
19232 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
19233 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
19234 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
19235 reading two opinions from
19236 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
19237 Phipps</a> and
19238 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
19239 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
19240 details about the original story.</p>
19241
19242 </div>
19243 <div class="tags">
19244
19245
19246 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>.
19247
19248
19249 </div>
19250 </div>
19251 <div class="padding"></div>
19252
19253 <div class="entry">
19254 <div class="title">
19255 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
19256 </div>
19257 <div class="date">
19258 18th October 2012
19259 </div>
19260 <div class="body">
19261 <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
19262 drain, and it is hard to fight against it. I try to do my best, but
19263 time is limited. I hope you do your best too. A few years ago I came
19264 across a marvellous drawing by
19265 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
19266 visualising some of what is going on.
19267
19268 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
19269 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
19270
19271 <blockquote>
19272 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
19273 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
19274 </blockquote>
19275
19276 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport? I do not. Do you feel safe when
19277 you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you
19278 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I
19279 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
19280 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
19281 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
19282
19283 </div>
19284 <div class="tags">
19285
19286
19287 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>.
19288
19289
19290 </div>
19291 </div>
19292 <div class="padding"></div>
19293
19294 <div class="entry">
19295 <div class="title">
19296 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
19297 </div>
19298 <div class="date">
19299 12th October 2012
19300 </div>
19301 <div class="body">
19302 <p>Thanks to a blog post by
19303 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
19304 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
19305 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
19306 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
19307 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
19308 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
19309 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information. To check if
19310 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
19311 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
19312 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic. However, we
19313 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
19314 matter".</p>
19315
19316 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
19317 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
19318 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
19319 health of its users. This caused the company behind the product,
19320 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
19321 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
19322 to argue its side.</p>
19323
19324 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
19325 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly. Lets hope the
19326 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
19327 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
19328
19329 <p>What is the harm, you might think. I suggest you take a look at
19330 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
19331 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
19332
19333 </div>
19334 <div class="tags">
19335
19336
19337 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>.
19338
19339
19340 </div>
19341 </div>
19342 <div class="padding"></div>
19343
19344 <div class="entry">
19345 <div class="title">
19346 <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>
19347 </div>
19348 <div class="date">
19349 3rd October 2012
19350 </div>
19351 <div class="body">
19352 <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
19353 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
19354 the computer science book collection available in his local
19355 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
19356 computer books becoming obsolete so soon. That is part of the reason
19357 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
19358 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
19359 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
19360 computer classic from trash. And they need to know which one will
19361 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
19362 recently published books.</p>
19363
19364 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
19365 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
19366 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
19367 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess. Once, just
19368 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
19369 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
19370 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection. I
19371 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
19372 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
19373 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
19374 collection</a>). I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
19375 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
19376 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
19377 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
19378 for the library that evening.</p>
19379
19380 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
19381 going to know that for example
19382 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
19383 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
19384 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
19385 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
19386 the suggestions for books to get? I know they would love to hear from
19387 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
19388 book right away.</p>
19389
19390 </div>
19391 <div class="tags">
19392
19393
19394 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19395
19396
19397 </div>
19398 </div>
19399 <div class="padding"></div>
19400
19401 <div class="entry">
19402 <div class="title">
19403 <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>
19404 </div>
19405 <div class="date">
19406 23rd September 2012
19407 </div>
19408 <div class="body">
19409 <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
19410 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
19411 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
19412 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
19413 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
19414 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
19415
19416 When I started, I
19417 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
19418 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
19419 and progress is a bit slow. Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
19420 mark for the first rough translation. At the moment, less than 700
19421 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate. With
19422 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
19423 complete the translation. This graph show the updated progress:</p>
19424
19425 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
19426
19427 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
19428 commitments. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
19429 the project files currently available from
19430 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19431
19432 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
19433 the updated
19434 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
19435 and
19436 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
19437 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
19438 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
19439 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
19440
19441 </div>
19442 <div class="tags">
19443
19444
19445 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>.
19446
19447
19448 </div>
19449 </div>
19450 <div class="padding"></div>
19451
19452 <div class="entry">
19453 <div class="title">
19454 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
19455 </div>
19456 <div class="date">
19457 17th September 2012
19458 </div>
19459 <div class="body">
19460 <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
19461 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19462 community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
19463 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
19464 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
19465 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
19466 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
19467
19468 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19469
19470 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
19471 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
19472 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
19473 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
19474 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
19475 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
19476 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
19477 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
19478 training is anyway very important</p>
19479
19480 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
19481 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
19482 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
19483 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
19484 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
19485
19486 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19487 project?</strong></p>
19488
19489 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
19490 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
19491 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
19492 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
19493 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
19494 hole.</p>
19495
19496 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19497 Edu?</strong></p>
19498
19499 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
19500 very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
19501 the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
19502 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
19503 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
19504 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
19505 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
19506 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
19507 hassle.</p>
19508
19509 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19510 Edu?</strong></p>
19511
19512 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
19513 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
19514 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
19515 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
19516 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
19517 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
19518 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
19519 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
19520
19521 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19522
19523 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
19524 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
19525 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
19526 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
19527 has the same...</p>
19528
19529 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
19530 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
19531 something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
19532 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
19533
19534 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19535 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19536
19537 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
19538 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
19539 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
19540
19541 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
19542 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
19543 don't.</p>
19544
19545 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
19546 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
19547 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
19548 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
19549 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
19550 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
19551 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
19552
19553 </div>
19554 <div class="tags">
19555
19556
19557 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19558
19559
19560 </div>
19561 </div>
19562 <div class="padding"></div>
19563
19564 <div class="entry">
19565 <div class="title">
19566 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
19567 </div>
19568 <div class="date">
19569 15th September 2012
19570 </div>
19571 <div class="body">
19572 <p>After the
19573 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
19574 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
19575 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
19576 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
19577 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
19578 area. A non-"working group" mailing list
19579 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
19580 was
19581 <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
19582 formal working group should be formed.</p>
19583
19584 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out. There is already
19585 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
19586 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
19587 participate in the ISO group. Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
19588 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
19589 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
19590 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
19591 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
19592
19593 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
19594 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
19595 IETF.</p>
19596
19597 </div>
19598 <div class="tags">
19599
19600
19601 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>.
19602
19603
19604 </div>
19605 </div>
19606 <div class="padding"></div>
19607
19608 <div class="entry">
19609 <div class="title">
19610 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
19611 </div>
19612 <div class="date">
19613 12th September 2012
19614 </div>
19615 <div class="body">
19616 <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
19617 publication of of
19618 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
19619 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
19620 intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as
19621 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In
19622 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
19623 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
19624 royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will
19625 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
19626 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
19627 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
19628
19629 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
19630 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
19631 free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
19632 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
19633
19634 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
19635 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
19636
19637 </div>
19638 <div class="tags">
19639
19640
19641 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>.
19642
19643
19644 </div>
19645 </div>
19646 <div class="padding"></div>
19647
19648 <div class="entry">
19649 <div class="title">
19650 <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>
19651 </div>
19652 <div class="date">
19653 7th September 2012
19654 </div>
19655 <div class="body">
19656 <p>As I
19657 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
19658 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
19659 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
19660 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
19661 repository for the project</a>.</p>
19662
19663 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
19664 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
19665 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
19666 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
19667
19668 <p>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
19669 PostScript formats at
19670 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
19671 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
19672
19673 </div>
19674 <div class="tags">
19675
19676
19677 Tags: <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>.
19678
19679
19680 </div>
19681 </div>
19682 <div class="padding"></div>
19683
19684 <div class="entry">
19685 <div class="title">
19686 <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>
19687 </div>
19688 <div class="date">
19689 23rd August 2012
19690 </div>
19691 <div class="body">
19692 <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
19693 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
19694 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
19695 revisit the great site
19696 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
19697 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format. I
19698 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
19699
19700 </div>
19701 <div class="tags">
19702
19703
19704 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>.
19705
19706
19707 </div>
19708 </div>
19709 <div class="padding"></div>
19710
19711 <div class="entry">
19712 <div class="title">
19713 <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>
19714 </div>
19715 <div class="date">
19716 17th August 2012
19717 </div>
19718 <div class="body">
19719 <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
19720 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
19721 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
19722 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
19723 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
19724 English book. It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
19725 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society. When the
19726 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
19727 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
19728 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law. This
19729 summer I
19730 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
19731 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
19732 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
19733
19734 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark. Then more than 50% of
19735 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
19736 titles and index entries are also counted). All parts from the
19737 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated. So is
19738 chapters six, seven and the conclusion. I created a graph to show the
19739 progress:</p>
19740
19741 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
19742
19743 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
19744 entries into the docbook. They were missing with the docbook version
19745 I initially started with. There are still quite a few index entries
19746 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done. I
19747 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
19748 english version of the docbook source.</p>
19749
19750 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
19751 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
19752 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
19753 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
19754 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
19755 around? I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
19756 me. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
19757 project files currently available from <a
19758 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19759
19760 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
19761 the updated
19762 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
19763 and
19764 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
19765 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
19766 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
19767 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
19768
19769 </div>
19770 <div class="tags">
19771
19772
19773 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>.
19774
19775
19776 </div>
19777 </div>
19778 <div class="padding"></div>
19779
19780 <div class="entry">
19781 <div class="title">
19782 <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>
19783 </div>
19784 <div class="date">
19785 10th August 2012
19786 </div>
19787 <div class="body">
19788 <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
19789 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
19790 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
19791 also', 'index' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
19792 this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document
19793 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
19794 correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the
19795 case for the language
19796 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
19797 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
19798
19799 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
19800 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
19801 all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
19802 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some
19803 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
19804
19805 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
19806 this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The
19807 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three
19808 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
19809 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
19810 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
19811 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
19812 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
19813 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
19814 alias for 'nb'.</p>
19815
19816 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only
19817 understand 'nn'. There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
19818 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
19819 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
19820 language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only
19821 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The xmlto tool only recognise
19822 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The end result that there is no language
19823 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
19824 at the same time. :(</p>
19825
19826 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
19827 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
19828 processors. :(</p>
19829
19830 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
19831
19832 </div>
19833 <div class="tags">
19834
19835
19836 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>.
19837
19838
19839 </div>
19840 </div>
19841 <div class="padding"></div>
19842
19843 <div class="entry">
19844 <div class="title">
19845 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
19846 </div>
19847 <div class="date">
19848 31st July 2012
19849 </div>
19850 <div class="body">
19851 <p>I tried to send this text to the
19852 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
19853 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
19854 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
19855 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
19856 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
19857 out.</p>
19858
19859 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
19860 learning curve at the moment.</p>
19861
19862 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
19863 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
19864 docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are
19865 available from
19866 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
19867 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
19868 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
19869 software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
19870 Squeeze.</p>
19871
19872 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
19873 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
19874 formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
19875 problems.</p>
19876
19877 <ul>
19878
19879 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
19880 as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
19881 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
19882 xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
19883 index references spanning several pages (See
19884 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
19885 I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
19886 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
19887
19888 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
19889 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
19890 #683163</a>).</li>
19891
19892 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
19893 show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
19894 footnote and text body, see
19895 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
19896 fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
19897 refs listed are not right).</li>
19898
19899 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
19900
19901 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
19902 index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
19903
19904 </ul>
19905
19906 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
19907 of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
19908 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
19909
19910 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
19911
19912 </div>
19913 <div class="tags">
19914
19915
19916 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>.
19917
19918
19919 </div>
19920 </div>
19921 <div class="padding"></div>
19922
19923 <div class="entry">
19924 <div class="title">
19925 <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>
19926 </div>
19927 <div class="date">
19928 21st July 2012
19929 </div>
19930 <div class="body">
19931 <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
19932 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
19933 norwegian version</a> of the book
19934 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
19935 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
19936 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six. The source files as well as a
19937 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
19938 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19939
19940 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
19941 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
19942 completely translated. This completes 26 percent of the number of
19943 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
19944 percent left to translate. A graph of the progress is present at the
19945 bottom of the github project page. There is still room for more
19946 contributors. Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
19947 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
19948 print. :)</p>
19949
19950 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
19951 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
19952 language.</p>
19953
19954 </div>
19955 <div class="tags">
19956
19957
19958 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>.
19959
19960
19961 </div>
19962 </div>
19963 <div class="padding"></div>
19964
19965 <div class="entry">
19966 <div class="title">
19967 <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>
19968 </div>
19969 <div class="date">
19970 16th July 2012
19971 </div>
19972 <div class="body">
19973 <p>I am currently working on a
19974 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
19975 to translate</a> the book
19976 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
19977 to Norwegian. And the source we base our translation on is the
19978 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
19979 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
19980 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
19981 tagged. The source files of this project is available from
19982 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19983
19984 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
19985 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert. Is there a
19986 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
19987 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
19988 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book? This will provide a
19989 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
19990 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version. If you can and want
19991 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
19992 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
19993
19994 </div>
19995 <div class="tags">
19996
19997
19998 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>.
19999
20000
20001 </div>
20002 </div>
20003 <div class="padding"></div>
20004
20005 <div class="entry">
20006 <div class="title">
20007 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
20008 </div>
20009 <div class="date">
20010 9th July 2012
20011 </div>
20012 <div class="body">
20013 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20014 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
20015 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
20016 country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
20017 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
20018 to adjust and scale the just released
20019 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
20020 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
20021 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
20022
20023 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20024
20025 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
20026 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
20027 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
20028 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
20029 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
20030 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
20031 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
20032 perspective when working with IT.</p>
20033
20034 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20035 project?</strong></p>
20036
20037 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
20038 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
20039 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
20040 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
20041 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
20042 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
20043
20044 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20045 Edu?</strong></p>
20046
20047 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
20048 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
20049 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
20050 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
20051 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
20052 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
20053 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
20054 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
20055 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
20056 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
20057 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
20058 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
20059 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
20060 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
20061 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
20062 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
20063 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
20064 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
20065 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
20066 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
20067 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
20068 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
20069 quicker to update.
20070
20071 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20072 Edu?</strong></p>
20073
20074 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
20075 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
20076 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
20077 sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
20078 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
20079 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
20080
20081 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
20082 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
20083 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
20084 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
20085 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
20086 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
20087 support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
20088 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
20089 need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
20090 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
20091 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
20092 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
20093 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
20094 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
20095 are done. This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
20096
20097 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
20098 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
20099 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
20100 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
20101 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
20102 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
20103 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
20104 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
20105
20106 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
20107 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
20108 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
20109 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
20110 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
20111 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
20112 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
20113 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
20114 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
20115 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
20116 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
20117 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
20118 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
20119 sound file.</p>
20120
20121 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
20122 will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
20123 they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
20124 look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
20125 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
20126 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
20127 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
20128 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
20129 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
20130
20131 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20132
20133 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
20134 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
20135 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
20136 )</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>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
20142 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
20143 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
20144 flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
20145 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
20146 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
20147 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
20148 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
20149 the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
20150 open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
20151 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
20152 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
20153 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
20154 desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
20155 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
20156
20157 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
20158 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
20159 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
20160 management with Airtime</a>,
20161 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
20162 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
20163 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
20164 be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
20165 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
20166
20167 </div>
20168 <div class="tags">
20169
20170
20171 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20172
20173
20174 </div>
20175 </div>
20176 <div class="padding"></div>
20177
20178 <div class="entry">
20179 <div class="title">
20180 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
20181 </div>
20182 <div class="date">
20183 8th July 2012
20184 </div>
20185 <div class="body">
20186 <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
20187 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
20188 in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
20189 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
20190 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
20191 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
20192 Steinberg in his blog post
20193 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
20194 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>". Read it and weep for the
20195 spending of your tax money.</p>
20196
20197 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
20198 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
20199 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
20200 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
20201 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
20202 purchases.</p>
20203
20204 </div>
20205 <div class="tags">
20206
20207
20208 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20209
20210
20211 </div>
20212 </div>
20213 <div class="padding"></div>
20214
20215 <div class="entry">
20216 <div class="title">
20217 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
20218 </div>
20219 <div class="date">
20220 7th July 2012
20221 </div>
20222 <div class="body">
20223 <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20224 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
20225 software. It is one of the packages not installed by default but
20226 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
20227 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
20228 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
20229 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
20230 receive. The software is
20231
20232 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
20233 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
20234 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
20235 both teachers and students. It is available both for
20236 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
20237 Windows</a>.</p>
20238
20239 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
20240 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
20241
20242 <p><ul>
20243
20244 <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
20245 You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
20246
20247 <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
20248 (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
20249 (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
20250 (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
20251 (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
20252 (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
20253 sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
20254 (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
20255 </li>
20256
20257 <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
20258 semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
20259
20260 <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
20261 GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
20262
20263 <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
20264 with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
20265
20266 <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
20267
20268 <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
20269 formats </li>
20270
20271 <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
20272 and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
20273 non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
20274 (as separate sets)</li>
20275
20276 <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
20277 (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
20278 percentage)</li>
20279
20280 <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
20281 demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
20282 memory):
20283 <ul>
20284 <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
20285 <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
20286 <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
20287 <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
20288 <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
20289 <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
20290 <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
20291 <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
20292 <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
20293 <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
20294 students sets for each activity. (it is possible
20295 also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
20296 activity)</li>
20297 <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
20298 <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
20299 </ul></li>
20300
20301 <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
20302 <ul>
20303 <li>Break periods</li>
20304 <li>For teacher(s):
20305 <ul>
20306 <li>Not available periods</li>
20307 <li>Max/min days per week</li>
20308 <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
20309 <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
20310 <li>Min hours daily</li>
20311 <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
20312
20313 <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
20314 days per week</li>
20315 </ul></li>
20316 <li>For students (sets):
20317 <ul>
20318 <li>Not available periods</li>
20319 <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
20320 <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
20321 <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
20322 <li>Min hours daily</li>
20323 <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
20324
20325 <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
20326 days per week</li>
20327 </ul></li>
20328 <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
20329 <ul>
20330 <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
20331 <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
20332 <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
20333 <li>Min/max days between them</li>
20334 <li>End(s) students day</li>
20335 <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
20336 <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
20337 flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
20338 <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
20339 <li>Not overlapping</li>
20340 <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
20341 <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
20342 </ul></li>
20343 </ul></li>
20344
20345 <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
20346 <ul>
20347 <li>Room not available periods</li>
20348 <li>For teacher(s):
20349 <ul>
20350 <li>Home room(s)</li>
20351 <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
20352 <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
20353 </ul>
20354 </li>
20355
20356 <li>For students (sets):
20357 <ul>
20358 <li>Home room(s)</li>
20359 <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
20360 <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
20361 </ul>
20362 </li>
20363 <li>Preferred room(s):
20364 <ul>
20365 <li>For a subject</li>
20366 <li>For an activity tag</li>
20367 <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
20368 <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
20369 </ul>
20370 </li>
20371
20372 <li>For a set of activities:
20373 <ul>
20374 <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
20375 </ul>
20376 </li>
20377 </ul>
20378 </li>
20379 </ul></p>
20380
20381 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
20382 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
20383 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
20384 manually, check it out.
20385
20386 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
20387 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
20388 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>. If you find FET useful, please provide
20389 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
20390 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
20391 section</a>.</p>
20392
20393 </div>
20394 <div class="tags">
20395
20396
20397 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20398
20399
20400 </div>
20401 </div>
20402 <div class="padding"></div>
20403
20404 <div class="entry">
20405 <div class="title">
20406 <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>
20407 </div>
20408 <div class="date">
20409 3rd July 2012
20410 </div>
20411 <div class="body">
20412 <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
20413 project (Norwegian version of
20414 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
20415 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
20416 a problem with the municipalities using
20417 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>. When FiksGataMi send a
20418 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
20419 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
20420 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address. The intention is to make
20421 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
20422 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
20423 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
20424 Zimbra. Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
20425 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
20426 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
20427 the From: header.</p>
20428
20429 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
20430 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
20431 problem. We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
20432 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
20433 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports. We have been in
20434 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
20435 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
20436 behaviour.</p>
20437
20438 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
20439 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
20440 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
20441 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
20442 differently. Anyone know? Please let us know at
20443 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
20444 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
20445
20446 </div>
20447 <div class="tags">
20448
20449
20450 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>.
20451
20452
20453 </div>
20454 </div>
20455 <div class="padding"></div>
20456
20457 <div class="entry">
20458 <div class="title">
20459 <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>
20460 </div>
20461 <div class="date">
20462 26th June 2012
20463 </div>
20464 <div class="body">
20465 <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
20466 another interview with the people behind
20467 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
20468 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
20469 helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
20470 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
20471 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
20472 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
20473 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
20474
20475 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20476
20477 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
20478 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
20479 ICT in schools</p>
20480
20481 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20482 project?</strong></p>
20483
20484 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
20485 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
20486 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
20487 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
20488
20489 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20490 Edu?</strong></p>
20491
20492 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
20493 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
20494 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
20495 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
20496
20497 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20498 Edu?</strong></p>
20499
20500 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
20501 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
20502 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
20503 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
20504 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
20505 technologies in school.</p>
20506
20507 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20508
20509 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
20510 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
20511 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
20512
20513 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20514 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20515
20516 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
20517 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
20518 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
20519 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
20520
20521 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
20522 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
20523 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
20524
20525 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
20526 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
20527 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
20528 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
20529 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
20530 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
20531 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
20532 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
20533 working there.</p>
20534
20535 </div>
20536 <div class="tags">
20537
20538
20539 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20540
20541
20542 </div>
20543 </div>
20544 <div class="padding"></div>
20545
20546 <div class="entry">
20547 <div class="title">
20548 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
20549 </div>
20550 <div class="date">
20551 24th June 2012
20552 </div>
20553 <div class="body">
20554 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
20555 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
20556 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
20557 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
20558 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
20559 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
20560 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
20561 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
20562 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
20563 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
20564 missing in my book.</p>
20565
20566 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
20567 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
20568 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
20569 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
20570 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
20571 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
20572 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
20573
20574 </div>
20575 <div class="tags">
20576
20577
20578 Tags: <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>.
20579
20580
20581 </div>
20582 </div>
20583 <div class="padding"></div>
20584
20585 <div class="entry">
20586 <div class="title">
20587 <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>
20588 </div>
20589 <div class="date">
20590 11th June 2012
20591 </div>
20592 <div class="body">
20593 <p>During my work on
20594 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
20595 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
20596 addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
20597 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
20598 explanation.</p>
20599
20600 <p><ul>
20601
20602 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
20603 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
20604 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
20605 system depend on tasksel tasks in
20606 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
20607 installation.</li>
20608
20609 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
20610 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
20611 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
20612 at least try to enable it for these services:
20613 <ul>
20614
20615 <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
20616 quotas.</li>
20617 <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
20618 <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
20619 <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
20620 <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
20621 <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
20622
20623 </ul></li>
20624
20625 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
20626 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
20627 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
20628 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
20629
20630 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
20631 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
20632 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
20633
20634 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
20635 touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
20636 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
20637 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
20638 it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
20639 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
20640
20641 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
20642 time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
20643 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
20644 in Wheezy.
20645
20646 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
20647 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
20648 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
20649
20650 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
20651 change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
20652 paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
20653 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
20654
20655 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
20656 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
20657 familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
20658 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
20659
20660 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
20661 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
20662 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
20663
20664 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
20665 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
20666 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
20667
20668 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
20669 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
20670 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
20671 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
20672 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
20673
20674 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
20675 <ul>
20676
20677 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
20678 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
20679 <li>and probably more?</li>
20680 </ul></li>
20681
20682 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
20683 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
20684 examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
20685 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
20686 some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
20687 could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
20688 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
20689 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
20690
20691
20692 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
20693 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
20694 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
20695 use.</li>
20696
20697 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
20698 interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
20699 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
20700 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
20701 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
20702
20703 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
20704 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
20705 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
20706 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
20707 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
20708 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
20709
20710 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
20711 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
20712 There are at least three implementations,
20713 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
20714 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
20715 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
20716 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
20717 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
20718 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
20719 given room.</li>
20720
20721 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
20722 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
20723 the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
20724 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
20725 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
20726 configuration and data with the central server. This should be
20727 investigated.</li>
20728
20729 </ul></p>
20730
20731 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
20732 version.</p>
20733
20734 </div>
20735 <div class="tags">
20736
20737
20738 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20739
20740
20741 </div>
20742 </div>
20743 <div class="padding"></div>
20744
20745 <div class="entry">
20746 <div class="title">
20747 <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>
20748 </div>
20749 <div class="date">
20750 9th June 2012
20751 </div>
20752 <div class="body">
20753 <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
20754 <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
20755 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
20756 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
20757 recognition on the TV image itself. It could let the viewer know who
20758 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
20759 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
20760 evaluate what is being said and done. That would be a feature I would
20761 be willing to pay for.</p>
20762
20763 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
20764 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
20765 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
20766 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
20767 Orwell</a>.</p>
20768
20769 </div>
20770 <div class="tags">
20771
20772
20773 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>.
20774
20775
20776 </div>
20777 </div>
20778 <div class="padding"></div>
20779
20780 <div class="entry">
20781 <div class="title">
20782 <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>
20783 </div>
20784 <div class="date">
20785 6th June 2012
20786 </div>
20787 <div class="body">
20788 <p>A few days ago
20789 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
20790 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
20791 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
20792 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
20793 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>. Combined with my web scraping
20794 code for HP, Dell and IBM
20795 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
20796 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
20797 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
20798 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
20799 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
20800
20801 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
20802 output:
20803
20804 <blockquote><pre>
20805 % 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>
20806 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": ""})
20807 %
20808 </pre></blockquote>
20809
20810 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
20811 support for other vendors. The python source is available on
20812 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
20813
20814 </div>
20815 <div class="tags">
20816
20817
20818 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>.
20819
20820
20821 </div>
20822 </div>
20823 <div class="padding"></div>
20824
20825 <div class="entry">
20826 <div class="title">
20827 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
20828 </div>
20829 <div class="date">
20830 2nd June 2012
20831 </div>
20832 <div class="body">
20833 <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
20834 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20835 mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
20836 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
20837 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
20838 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
20839
20840 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20841
20842 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
20843 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
20844 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
20845 by Angela).</p>
20846
20847 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
20848 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
20849 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
20850 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
20851 becoming an osteopath.</p>
20852
20853 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
20854 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
20855 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
20856 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
20857 skills with communication skills.</p>
20858
20859 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20860 project?</strong></p>
20861
20862 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
20863 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
20864 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
20865 people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
20866 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
20867
20868 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
20869 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
20870 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
20871 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
20872 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
20873 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
20874 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
20875 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
20876 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
20877
20878 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
20879 people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
20880 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
20881
20882 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
20883
20884 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
20885 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
20886 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
20887 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
20888 IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
20889 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
20890 possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
20891 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
20892 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
20893 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
20894 point.</p>
20895
20896 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
20897 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
20898 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
20899 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
20900 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
20901 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
20902
20903 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
20904 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
20905 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
20906 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
20907 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
20908 spare time.</p>
20909
20910 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
20911 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
20912 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
20913 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
20914 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
20915
20916 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
20917 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
20918 avoidance do exist.</p>
20919
20920 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
20921 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
20922 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
20923 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
20924 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
20925 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
20926 and probably a gain for all.</p>
20927
20928 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20929 Edu?</strong></p>
20930
20931 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
20932 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
20933 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
20934 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
20935 project communication, honest communication within the group of
20936 developers, etc.</p>
20937
20938 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20939 Edu?</strong></p>
20940
20941 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
20942
20943 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
20944 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
20945 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
20946 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
20947 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
20948 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
20949 contribute).</p>
20950
20951 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
20952 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
20953 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
20954 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
20955 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
20956 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
20957 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
20958 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
20959 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
20960 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
20961
20962 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20963
20964 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
20965
20966 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
20967 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
20968 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
20969
20970 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
20971 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
20972 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
20973 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
20974
20975 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
20976 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
20977 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
20978 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
20979 whiteboard.</p>
20980
20981 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
20982
20983 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20984 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20985
20986 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
20987 enrol people.</p>
20988
20989 </div>
20990 <div class="tags">
20991
20992
20993 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20994
20995
20996 </div>
20997 </div>
20998 <div class="padding"></div>
20999
21000 <div class="entry">
21001 <div class="title">
21002 <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>
21003 </div>
21004 <div class="date">
21005 1st June 2012
21006 </div>
21007 <div class="body">
21008 <p>A few years ago I wrote
21009 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
21010 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
21011 I have learned from colleges here at the
21012 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
21013 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
21014 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
21015 readable information about the support status. This perl code
21016 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
21017
21018 <p><pre>
21019 use strict;
21020 use warnings;
21021 use SOAP::Lite;
21022 use Data::Dumper;
21023 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
21024 my $App = 'test';
21025 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
21026 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
21027 my $s = SOAP::Lite
21028 -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
21029 -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
21030 -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
21031 ;
21032 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
21033 SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
21034 SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
21035 SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
21036 );
21037 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
21038 </pre></p>
21039
21040 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
21041
21042 <p><pre>
21043 $VAR1 = {
21044 'Asset' => {
21045 'Entitlements' => {
21046 'EntitlementData' => [
21047 {
21048 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
21049 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
21050 'Provider' => '',
21051 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
21052 'DaysLeft' => '0'
21053 },
21054 {
21055 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
21056 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
21057 'Provider' => '',
21058 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
21059 'DaysLeft' => '0'
21060 },
21061 {
21062 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
21063 'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
21064 'Provider' => '',
21065 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
21066 'DaysLeft' => '0'
21067 }
21068 ]
21069 },
21070 'AssetHeaderData' => {
21071 'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
21072 'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
21073 'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
21074 'Buid' => '2323',
21075 'Region' => 'Europe',
21076 'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
21077 'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
21078 }
21079 }
21080 };
21081 </pre></p>
21082
21083 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
21084 service outside the
21085 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
21086 documentation</a>, and according to
21087 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
21088 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
21089 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
21090
21091 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
21092 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
21093
21094 </div>
21095 <div class="tags">
21096
21097
21098 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>.
21099
21100
21101 </div>
21102 </div>
21103 <div class="padding"></div>
21104
21105 <div class="entry">
21106 <div class="title">
21107 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
21108 </div>
21109 <div class="date">
21110 31st May 2012
21111 </div>
21112 <div class="body">
21113 <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
21114 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
21115 mail, and I've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are
21116 running Debian Squeeze, where
21117 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
21118 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
21119 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked
21120 just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was
21121 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
21122 another day.</p>
21123
21124 <p>After calibration, I get a
21125 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
21126 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
21127 tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
21128 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
21129 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
21130 monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
21131 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
21132 monitor. After searching a bit, I
21133 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
21134 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
21135 and a simple</p>
21136
21137 <p><pre>
21138 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
21139 </pre></p>
21140
21141 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The
21142 result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the
21143 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
21144 enough for now.</p>
21145
21146 </div>
21147 <div class="tags">
21148
21149
21150 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21151
21152
21153 </div>
21154 </div>
21155 <div class="padding"></div>
21156
21157 <div class="entry">
21158 <div class="title">
21159 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
21160 </div>
21161 <div class="date">
21162 27th May 2012
21163 </div>
21164 <div class="body">
21165 <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
21166 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
21167 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
21168 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
21169 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
21170 since then, helping to make sure the
21171 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
21172 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
21173
21174 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21175
21176 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
21177 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
21178 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
21179 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
21180 O- or A-level ("Abitur"). For quite as long, I've been taking care of
21181 our computer network.</p>
21182
21183 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
21184 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
21185 (4 months).</p>
21186
21187 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21188 project?</strong></p>
21189
21190 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
21191 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
21192 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
21193 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
21194 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
21195 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
21196 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
21197 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
21198 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
21199 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
21200 locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
21201 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
21202 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
21203 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
21204
21205 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21206 Edu?</strong></p>
21207
21208 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
21209 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
21210 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
21211 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
21212 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
21213 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
21214 labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
21215 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
21216
21217 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21218 Edu?</strong></p>
21219
21220 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
21221 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
21222 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
21223 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
21224 office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
21225 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
21226 capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
21227 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
21228 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
21229 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
21230 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
21231 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
21232
21233 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21234
21235 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
21236 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
21237 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
21238
21239 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21240 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21241
21242 <p><ol>
21243
21244 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
21245 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
21246 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
21247 developing.</li>
21248
21249 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
21250 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
21251 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
21252 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
21253 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
21254
21255 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
21256 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
21257 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
21258
21259 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
21260 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
21261 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
21262 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
21263
21264 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
21265 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
21266 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
21267
21268 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
21269
21270 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
21271 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
21272 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
21273 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
21274
21275 </ol></p>
21276
21277 </div>
21278 <div class="tags">
21279
21280
21281 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21282
21283
21284 </div>
21285 </div>
21286 <div class="padding"></div>
21287
21288 <div class="entry">
21289 <div class="title">
21290 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
21291 </div>
21292 <div class="date">
21293 26th May 2012
21294 </div>
21295 <div class="body">
21296 <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
21297 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
21298 government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his
21299 assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my
21300 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
21301
21302 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi. I just noted your
21303 <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>
21304 comment:</p>
21305
21306 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
21307 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
21308 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
21309 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
21310 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
21311 </blockquote></p>
21312
21313 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is
21314 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
21315 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
21316 at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
21317 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
21318 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
21319 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
21320 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
21321 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In
21322 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
21323 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
21324 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
21325 of wasted effort.</p>
21326
21327 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
21328 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
21329 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
21330
21331 <p>See
21332 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
21333 and
21334 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
21335 for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
21336 </blockquote></p>
21337
21338 </div>
21339 <div class="tags">
21340
21341
21342 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>.
21343
21344
21345 </div>
21346 </div>
21347 <div class="padding"></div>
21348
21349 <div class="entry">
21350 <div class="title">
21351 <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>
21352 </div>
21353 <div class="date">
21354 18th May 2012
21355 </div>
21356 <div class="body">
21357 <p>In january, I
21358 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
21359 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
21360 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
21361 the color on a computer screen. The software required is
21362 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
21363 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
21364 batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
21365 opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
21366 delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
21367 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
21368
21369 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
21370 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
21371 drivers. :)</p>
21372
21373 </div>
21374 <div class="tags">
21375
21376
21377 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21378
21379
21380 </div>
21381 </div>
21382 <div class="padding"></div>
21383
21384 <div class="entry">
21385 <div class="title">
21386 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
21387 </div>
21388 <div class="date">
21389 13th May 2012
21390 </div>
21391 <div class="body">
21392 <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
21393 publish another interview with the people behind
21394 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
21395 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
21396 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
21397 details get right before release.
21398
21399 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21400
21401 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
21402 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
21403 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
21404 international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
21405 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
21406 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
21407 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
21408 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
21409
21410 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
21411 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
21412 home since 2006.</p>
21413
21414 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21415 project?</strong></p>
21416
21417 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
21418 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
21419 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
21420 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
21421 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
21422 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
21423
21424 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
21425 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
21426 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
21427 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
21428 and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
21429 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
21430 building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
21431 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
21432 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
21433 costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
21434 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
21435 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
21436 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
21437 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
21438 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
21439 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
21440
21441 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21442 Edu?</strong></p>
21443
21444 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
21445 for me as today.</p>
21446
21447 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
21448
21449 <p><ul>
21450
21451 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
21452 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
21453
21454 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
21455 cost.</li>
21456
21457 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
21458 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
21459 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
21460 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
21461 server</li>
21462
21463 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
21464 school.</li>
21465
21466 </ul></p>
21467
21468 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
21469 came up in this way:</p>
21470
21471 <p><ul>
21472
21473 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
21474 now.</li>
21475
21476 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
21477 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
21478 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
21479
21480 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
21481 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
21482 interfaces used in the past.</li>
21483
21484 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
21485 different needs.</li>
21486
21487 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
21488
21489 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
21490 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
21491 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
21492
21493 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
21494 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
21495
21496 </ul></p>
21497
21498 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21499 Edu?</strong></p>
21500
21501 <p><ul>
21502
21503 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
21504 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
21505 whole municipality areas.</li>
21506
21507 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
21508 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
21509 politicians.</li>
21510
21511 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
21512
21513 </ul></p>
21514
21515 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21516
21517 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
21518 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
21519 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
21520 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
21521 need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
21522 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
21523
21524 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
21525 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
21526 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
21527 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
21528 and the whole family. I probably forgot something.</p>
21529
21530 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21531 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21532
21533 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
21534 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
21535 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
21536
21537 </div>
21538 <div class="tags">
21539
21540
21541 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21542
21543
21544 </div>
21545 </div>
21546 <div class="padding"></div>
21547
21548 <div class="entry">
21549 <div class="title">
21550 <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>
21551 </div>
21552 <div class="date">
21553 30th April 2012
21554 </div>
21555 <div class="body">
21556 <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
21557 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
21558
21559 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
21560 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
21561 But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last
21562 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
21563 time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did
21564 not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a
21565 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
21566 discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these
21567 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers". The hair saloons
21568 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
21569 companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones
21570 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their
21571 efficiency. It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
21572 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had
21573 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
21574 producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
21575
21576 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
21577 straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
21578 did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on
21579 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
21580 around NOK 4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and
21581 finally found a Danish supplier
21582 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
21583 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>. We ordered one, and it arrived a few
21584 days ago.</p>
21585
21586 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
21587 to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only
21588 need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested
21589 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
21590 cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
21591 toys.</p>
21592
21593 </div>
21594 <div class="tags">
21595
21596
21597 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21598
21599
21600 </div>
21601 </div>
21602 <div class="padding"></div>
21603
21604 <div class="entry">
21605 <div class="title">
21606 <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>
21607 </div>
21608 <div class="date">
21609 26th April 2012
21610 </div>
21611 <div class="body">
21612 <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
21613 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
21614 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
21615 that the video editor application included with
21616 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
21617 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use. The article is mostly
21618 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
21619
21620 <p><blockquote>
21621 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
21622 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
21623 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
21624 </blockquote></p>
21625
21626 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
21627
21628 <p><blockquote>
21629 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
21630 commercially. Although I can ONLY use them privately."
21631 </blockquote></p>
21632
21633 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
21634 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
21635 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
21636 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>. The HTC One X specification specifies that
21637 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
21638 video. AMR is
21639 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
21640 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
21641 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
21642 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>. MP4 is
21643 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
21644 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
21645 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
21646
21647 <p>I know why I prefer
21648 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
21649 standards</a> also for video.</p>
21650
21651 </div>
21652 <div class="tags">
21653
21654
21655 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>.
21656
21657
21658 </div>
21659 </div>
21660 <div class="padding"></div>
21661
21662 <div class="entry">
21663 <div class="title">
21664 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
21665 </div>
21666 <div class="date">
21667 19th April 2012
21668 </div>
21669 <div class="body">
21670 <p>Here in Norway, the
21671 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
21672 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
21673 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
21674 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
21675 government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made
21676 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
21677 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
21678 to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete
21679 on the same level.</p>
21680
21681 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
21682 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
21683 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
21684 directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
21685 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
21686 implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
21687 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
21688 willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In
21689 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
21690 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By
21691 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
21692 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
21693 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
21694 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
21695 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
21696 to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result
21697 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
21698 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
21699
21700 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
21701 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
21702 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free
21703 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
21704 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
21705 in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
21706 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
21707 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
21708
21709 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
21710 from Simon Phipps
21711 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
21712 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
21713
21714 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
21715 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
21716 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
21717 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government. I
21718 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
21719 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
21720 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
21721 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
21722 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
21723
21724 </div>
21725 <div class="tags">
21726
21727
21728 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>.
21729
21730
21731 </div>
21732 </div>
21733 <div class="padding"></div>
21734
21735 <div class="entry">
21736 <div class="title">
21737 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
21738 </div>
21739 <div class="date">
21740 15th April 2012
21741 </div>
21742 <div class="body">
21743 <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
21744 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
21745 setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
21746 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
21747 years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
21748 up in the recently released
21749 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
21750 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
21751
21752 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21753
21754 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
21755 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
21756 Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
21757 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
21758 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
21759 information technology and science/technology.</p>
21760
21761 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21762 project?</strong></p>
21763
21764 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
21765 project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
21766 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
21767 contributing.</p>
21768
21769 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21770 Edu?</strong></p>
21771
21772 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
21773 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
21774 Debian Project!</p>
21775
21776 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21777 Edu?</strong></p>
21778
21779 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
21780 downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
21781 setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
21782 possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
21783 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
21784 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
21785 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
21786
21787 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
21788 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
21789
21790 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21791
21792 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
21793 on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
21794 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
21795 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
21796
21797 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21798 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21799
21800 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
21801 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
21802 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school
21803 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
21804 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
21805 free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
21806 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
21807
21808 <p>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
21809 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
21810 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
21811 the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
21812 "Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
21813 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
21814 fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
21815 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
21816
21817 </div>
21818 <div class="tags">
21819
21820
21821 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21822
21823
21824 </div>
21825 </div>
21826 <div class="padding"></div>
21827
21828 <div class="entry">
21829 <div class="title">
21830 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
21831 </div>
21832 <div class="date">
21833 8th April 2012
21834 </div>
21835 <div class="body">
21836 <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
21837 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
21838 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
21839 contributor to the
21840 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
21841 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
21842
21843 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21844
21845 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
21846 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
21847
21848 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21849 project?</strong></p>
21850
21851 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
21852 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
21853 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
21854 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
21855 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
21856 "localisation".</p>
21857
21858 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21859 Edu?</strong></p>
21860
21861 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21862 Edu?</strong></p>
21863
21864 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
21865 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
21866 education system.</p>
21867
21868 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
21869 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
21870 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
21871 money on the latest hardware.</p>
21872
21873 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21874
21875 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
21876 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
21877 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
21878
21879 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21880 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21881
21882 <p>Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
21883 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
21884 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
21885
21886 </div>
21887 <div class="tags">
21888
21889
21890 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21891
21892
21893 </div>
21894 </div>
21895 <div class="padding"></div>
21896
21897 <div class="entry">
21898 <div class="title">
21899 <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>
21900 </div>
21901 <div class="date">
21902 6th April 2012
21903 </div>
21904 <div class="body">
21905 <p>Recently I have spent time with
21906 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
21907 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
21908 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
21909 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
21910 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
21911 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
21912 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
21913 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
21914
21915 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
21916 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
21917 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
21918 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
21919 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
21920 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
21921 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
21922 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
21923
21924 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
21925 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
21926 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
21927 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
21928 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
21929 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
21930 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
21931 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
21932
21933 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
21934 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
21935 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
21936 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
21937 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
21938 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
21939 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
21940 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
21941 almost instantaneous. I'm not quite sure where to make the package
21942 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
21943
21944 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
21945 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
21946 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
21947 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
21948
21949 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
21950 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
21951
21952 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
21953 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
21954 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
21955 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
21956
21957 </div>
21958 <div class="tags">
21959
21960
21961 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21962
21963
21964 </div>
21965 </div>
21966 <div class="padding"></div>
21967
21968 <div class="entry">
21969 <div class="title">
21970 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
21971 </div>
21972 <div class="date">
21973 5th April 2012
21974 </div>
21975 <div class="body">
21976 <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
21977 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
21978 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
21979 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
21980 for schools. Check out his article
21981 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
21982 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
21983
21984 </div>
21985 <div class="tags">
21986
21987
21988 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21989
21990
21991 </div>
21992 </div>
21993 <div class="padding"></div>
21994
21995 <div class="entry">
21996 <div class="title">
21997 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
21998 </div>
21999 <div class="date">
22000 1st April 2012
22001 </div>
22002 <div class="body">
22003 <p>Germany is a core area for the
22004 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
22005 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
22006 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
22007
22008 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22009
22010 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
22011 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
22012 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
22013 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
22014 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
22015 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
22016 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
22017 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
22018
22019 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
22020 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
22021 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
22022 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
22023 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
22024 the end of April this year.</p>
22025
22026 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22027 project?</strong></p>
22028
22029 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
22030 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
22031 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
22032 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
22033 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
22034 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
22035 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
22036 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
22037 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
22038 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
22039 Skolelinux.</p>
22040
22041 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
22042 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
22043 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
22044 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
22045 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
22046 the admin teachers.</p>
22047
22048 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22049 Edu?</strong></p>
22050
22051 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
22052 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
22053 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
22054
22055 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
22056 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
22057 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of
22058 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
22059 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
22060
22061 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22062 Edu?</strong></p>
22063
22064 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
22065
22066 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22067
22068 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
22069 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
22070 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
22071 LibreOffice.</p>
22072
22073 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22074 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22075
22076 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
22077 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
22078 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
22079
22080 </div>
22081 <div class="tags">
22082
22083
22084 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22085
22086
22087 </div>
22088 </div>
22089 <div class="padding"></div>
22090
22091 <div class="entry">
22092 <div class="title">
22093 <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>
22094 </div>
22095 <div class="date">
22096 25th March 2012
22097 </div>
22098 <div class="body">
22099 <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
22100
22101 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
22102 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
22103 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
22104 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
22105 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
22106 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
22107 and download as a
22108 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
22109 Theora</a> file. Check it out below.</p>
22110
22111 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
22112 <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"' />
22113 <p>Download video as
22114 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
22115 </video></p>
22116
22117 </div>
22118 <div class="tags">
22119
22120
22121 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22122
22123
22124 </div>
22125 </div>
22126 <div class="padding"></div>
22127
22128 <div class="entry">
22129 <div class="title">
22130 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
22131 </div>
22132 <div class="date">
22133 19th March 2012
22134 </div>
22135 <div class="body">
22136 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
22137 users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
22138 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
22139 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
22140 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
22141
22142 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22143
22144 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
22145 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
22146 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
22147 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
22148 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
22149 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
22150 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
22151 installations.</p>
22152
22153 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22154 project?</strong></p>
22155
22156 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
22157 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
22158 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
22159 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
22160 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
22161 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
22162 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
22163 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
22164 these things we decided to try it.</p>
22165
22166 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22167 Edu?</strong></p>
22168
22169 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
22170 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
22171 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
22172 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
22173 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
22174 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
22175 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
22176 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
22177
22178 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22179 Edu?</strong></p>
22180
22181 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
22182 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
22183 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
22184 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
22185 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
22186
22187 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22188
22189 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
22190 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
22191 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
22192 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
22193 that counts...)</p>
22194
22195 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22196 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22197
22198 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
22199 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
22200 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
22201 applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
22202 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
22203 XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
22204 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
22205 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
22206 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
22207 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
22208 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
22209
22210 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
22211 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
22212 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
22213
22214 </div>
22215 <div class="tags">
22216
22217
22218 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22219
22220
22221 </div>
22222 </div>
22223 <div class="padding"></div>
22224
22225 <div class="entry">
22226 <div class="title">
22227 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
22228 </div>
22229 <div class="date">
22230 16th March 2012
22231 </div>
22232 <div class="body">
22233 <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
22234 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
22235 translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
22236 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
22237
22238 <ol>
22239
22240 <li>The documentation is written in a
22241 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
22242 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
22243 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
22244 docbook XML.</li>
22245
22246 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
22247 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
22248 with the translated text.</li>
22249
22250 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
22251 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
22252 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
22253 the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
22254 images.</li>
22255
22256 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
22257 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
22258
22259 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
22260 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
22261
22262 </ol>
22263
22264 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
22265 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
22266 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained. The docbook
22267 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
22268 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
22269
22270 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
22271 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
22272 package</a>.</p>
22273
22274 </div>
22275 <div class="tags">
22276
22277
22278 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22279
22280
22281 </div>
22282 </div>
22283 <div class="padding"></div>
22284
22285 <div class="entry">
22286 <div class="title">
22287 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
22288 </div>
22289 <div class="date">
22290 11th March 2012
22291 </div>
22292 <div class="body">
22293 <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
22294 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
22295 on Debian/Squeeze. The full announcement is
22296 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
22297 from the project announcement list. Now is a good time to test if it
22298 you have not done so already.</p>
22299
22300 <p>I plan to present the new version at
22301 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
22302 meeting</a> on tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there if you are
22303 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
22304
22305 </div>
22306 <div class="tags">
22307
22308
22309 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22310
22311
22312 </div>
22313 </div>
22314 <div class="padding"></div>
22315
22316 <div class="entry">
22317 <div class="title">
22318 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
22319 </div>
22320 <div class="date">
22321 9th March 2012
22322 </div>
22323 <div class="body">
22324 <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
22325 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
22326 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
22327 community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
22328 more international audience.</p>
22329
22330 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
22331 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
22332 Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
22333 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
22334 and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
22335 work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
22336 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
22337
22338
22339 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22340
22341 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
22342 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
22343 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
22344 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
22345 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
22346 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
22347 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
22348 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
22349 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
22350 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
22351 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
22352
22353 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22354 project?</strong></p>
22355
22356 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
22357 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
22358 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
22359 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
22360 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
22361 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
22362 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
22363 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
22364 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
22365 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
22366 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
22367 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
22368 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
22369
22370 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22371 Edu?</strong></p>
22372
22373 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
22374 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
22375 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
22376 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
22377 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
22378 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
22379 Japan.</p>
22380
22381 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22382 Edu?</strong></p>
22383
22384 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
22385 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
22386 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
22387 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
22388 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
22389 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
22390 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
22391 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
22392 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
22393 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
22394 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
22395 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
22396 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
22397 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
22398 help.</p>
22399
22400 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22401
22402 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
22403 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
22404 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
22405 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
22406 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
22407 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
22408 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
22409 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
22410 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
22411 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
22412 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
22413
22414 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22415 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22416
22417 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
22418 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
22419 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
22420 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
22421 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
22422 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
22423 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
22424 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
22425 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
22426 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
22427 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
22428 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
22429
22430 </div>
22431 <div class="tags">
22432
22433
22434 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22435
22436
22437 </div>
22438 </div>
22439 <div class="padding"></div>
22440
22441 <div class="entry">
22442 <div class="title">
22443 <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>
22444 </div>
22445 <div class="date">
22446 7th March 2012
22447 </div>
22448 <div class="body">
22449 <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
22450
22451 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
22452 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
22453 Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
22454 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
22455 download as a
22456 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
22457 Theora</a> file. Check it out below.</p>
22458
22459 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
22460 <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"' />
22461 <p>Download video as
22462 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
22463 </video></p>
22464
22465 </div>
22466 <div class="tags">
22467
22468
22469 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22470
22471
22472 </div>
22473 </div>
22474 <div class="padding"></div>
22475
22476 <div class="entry">
22477 <div class="title">
22478 <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>
22479 </div>
22480 <div class="date">
22481 4th March 2012
22482 </div>
22483 <div class="body">
22484 <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
22485 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
22486 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze. The full announcement is
22487 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
22488 from the project announcement list. Check it out if you
22489 need a software solution for your school.</p>
22490
22491 </div>
22492 <div class="tags">
22493
22494
22495 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22496
22497
22498 </div>
22499 </div>
22500 <div class="padding"></div>
22501
22502 <div class="entry">
22503 <div class="title">
22504 <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>
22505 </div>
22506 <div class="date">
22507 3rd March 2012
22508 </div>
22509 <div class="body">
22510 <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
22511 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
22512 for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher
22513 needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called "stopmotion",
22514 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
22515 national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and
22516 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
22517 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman
22518 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
22519 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
22520 animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got
22521 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
22522 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last
22523 year...</p>
22524
22525 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
22526 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
22527 name,
22528 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
22529 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
22530 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
22531 mean). I've been following
22532 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
22533 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
22534 the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies.
22535 Check it out. :)</p>
22536
22537 </div>
22538 <div class="tags">
22539
22540
22541 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22542
22543
22544 </div>
22545 </div>
22546 <div class="padding"></div>
22547
22548 <div class="entry">
22549 <div class="title">
22550 <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>
22551 </div>
22552 <div class="date">
22553 27th February 2012
22554 </div>
22555 <div class="body">
22556 <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
22557 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
22558 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze. The full announcement did for some
22559 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
22560 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
22561 from the Debian development announcement list. Check it out if you
22562 need a software solution for your school.</p>
22563
22564 </div>
22565 <div class="tags">
22566
22567
22568 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22569
22570
22571 </div>
22572 </div>
22573 <div class="padding"></div>
22574
22575 <div class="entry">
22576 <div class="title">
22577 <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>
22578 </div>
22579 <div class="date">
22580 19th February 2012
22581 </div>
22582 <div class="body">
22583 <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
22584 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
22585 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
22586 on Squeeze. The full announcement is
22587 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
22588 on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
22589 solution for your school.</p>
22590
22591 </div>
22592 <div class="tags">
22593
22594
22595 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22596
22597
22598 </div>
22599 </div>
22600 <div class="padding"></div>
22601
22602 <div class="entry">
22603 <div class="title">
22604 <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>
22605 </div>
22606 <div class="date">
22607 14th February 2012
22608 </div>
22609 <div class="body">
22610 <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems. Thanks to Linux
22611 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
22612 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
22613 close</a> this summer :). But once a disk is starting to behave
22614 funny, a practical problem present itself. How to get from the Linux
22615 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
22616 the disk when the computer is turned off? In my case I have SATA
22617 disks with a unique ID printed on the label. All I need is a way to
22618 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
22619
22620 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
22621 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
22622 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
22623 printed on the disk label. The following (almost) one-liner can be
22624 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
22625
22626 <blockquote><pre>
22627 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
22628 do
22629 printf "Failed disk $d: "
22630 hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
22631 done
22632 </blockquote></pre>
22633
22634 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
22635 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
22636
22637 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
22638
22639 <blockquote><pre>
22640 Failed disk sdd1: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
22641 Failed disk sdd2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
22642 Failed disk sde2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1840589
22643 </blockquote></pre>
22644
22645 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
22646 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
22647 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
22648 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label. The vendor
22649 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
22650 mounted inside my box.</p>
22651
22652 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
22653 Software RAID in the
22654 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
22655 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
22656 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail. At the moment
22657 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
22658 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
22659 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
22660
22661 </div>
22662 <div class="tags">
22663
22664
22665 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>.
22666
22667
22668 </div>
22669 </div>
22670 <div class="padding"></div>
22671
22672 <div class="entry">
22673 <div class="title">
22674 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
22675 </div>
22676 <div class="date">
22677 13th February 2012
22678 </div>
22679 <div class="body">
22680 <p>New in the Squeeze version of
22681 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
22682 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
22683 based on their environment. We want all systems on the client to use
22684 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
22685 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
22686 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings. The schools can
22687 change the global proxy setting by editing
22688 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
22689 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
22690
22691 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
22692 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
22693 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
22694
22695 <blockquote><pre>
22696 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
22697 {
22698 if (!isResolvable(host) ||
22699 isPlainHostName(host) ||
22700 dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
22701 return "DIRECT";
22702 else
22703 return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
22704 }
22705 </pre></blockquote>
22706
22707 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
22708
22709 <blockquote><pre>
22710 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
22711 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
22712 </pre></blockquote>
22713
22714 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
22715 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
22716 would be used for
22717 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
22718 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
22719 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>. The perl script wpad-extract work just
22720 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
22721 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
22722 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
22723 library. I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
22724 is frozen. An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
22725 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
22726 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
22727
22728 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
22729 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
22730 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
22731 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
22732 feature when it is connected to other networks. And if no proxy is
22733 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
22734
22735 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
22736 or security problem. But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
22737 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
22738 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
22739 distinction to be academic. If you are afraid of using the wrong
22740 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
22741 first place. In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
22742 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
22743 the network setup changes.</p>
22744
22745 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
22746 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
22747 draft</a> and a
22748 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
22749 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
22750
22751 </div>
22752 <div class="tags">
22753
22754
22755 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22756
22757
22758 </div>
22759 </div>
22760 <div class="padding"></div>
22761
22762 <div class="entry">
22763 <div class="title">
22764 <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>
22765 </div>
22766 <div class="date">
22767 5th February 2012
22768 </div>
22769 <div class="body">
22770 <p>Since the Lenny version of
22771 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
22772 feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is
22773 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
22774 in the morning. This is done using the
22775 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
22776
22777 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
22778 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in
22779 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
22780 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
22781 shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by
22782 the
22783 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
22784 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
22785 10 minutes. If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
22786 try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented
22787 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
22788
22789 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
22790 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
22791 the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work
22792 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I've seen old
22793 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
22794 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot. If you have one of
22795 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
22796
22797 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
22798 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a
22799 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
22800 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
22801 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
22802
22803 </div>
22804 <div class="tags">
22805
22806
22807 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22808
22809
22810 </div>
22811 </div>
22812 <div class="padding"></div>
22813
22814 <div class="entry">
22815 <div class="title">
22816 <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>
22817 </div>
22818 <div class="date">
22819 4th February 2012
22820 </div>
22821 <div class="body">
22822 <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
22823 publish the third beta version of
22824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
22825 on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
22826 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
22827 installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software
22828 solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is
22829 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
22830 on the project announcement list.</p>
22831
22832 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
22833 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
22834
22835 <ul>
22836
22837 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
22838 10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
22839 the installation.</li>
22840
22841 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
22842 Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
22843
22844 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
22845 disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on
22846 the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
22847
22848 <li>The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user
22849 for the local system administrator is created during installation
22850 instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
22851 and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
22852 membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
22853 up to date on the system.</li>
22854
22855 </ul>
22856
22857 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
22858 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look
22859 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
22860 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
22861
22862 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
22863 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
22864 gathering</a> in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze
22865 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I
22866 will see you there?</p>
22867
22868 </div>
22869 <div class="tags">
22870
22871
22872 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22873
22874
22875 </div>
22876 </div>
22877 <div class="padding"></div>
22878
22879 <div class="entry">
22880 <div class="title">
22881 <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>
22882 </div>
22883 <div class="date">
22884 27th January 2012
22885 </div>
22886 <div class="body">
22887 <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
22888 This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
22889 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
22890 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
22891 firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a
22892 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
22893 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
22894
22895 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
22896 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
22897 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
22898 during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used
22899 by the installer when installing from from local media. But for
22900 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
22901 not taken care of by this.</p>
22902
22903 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
22904 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
22905 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
22906 firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
22907 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
22908 the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do
22909 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
22910 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
22911 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the
22912 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
22913 firmware packages.</p>
22914
22915 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
22916 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
22917 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
22918 included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation
22919 initrd with extra firmware, the
22920 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
22921 provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
22922 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
22923
22924 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
22925 network cards working. For this,
22926 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
22927 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
22928 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
22929
22930 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We
22931 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
22932 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
22933
22934 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
22935 try.</p>
22936
22937 </div>
22938 <div class="tags">
22939
22940
22941 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22942
22943
22944 </div>
22945 </div>
22946 <div class="padding"></div>
22947
22948 <div class="entry">
22949 <div class="title">
22950 <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>
22951 </div>
22952 <div class="date">
22953 25th January 2012
22954 </div>
22955 <div class="body">
22956 <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
22957 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
22958 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
22959 the computers in a school without much manual labour. Here is a short
22960 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
22961
22962 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
22963 central server in the network. Next, PXE boot all the client machines
22964 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
22965 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server. When
22966 this is done, log on to the central server and run
22967 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
22968 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP. The output
22969 will look similar to this:</p>
22970
22971 <p><blockquote><pre>
22972 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
22973 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
22974 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.
22975
22976 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
22977
22978 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22979 enter password: *******
22980 %
22981 </pre></blockquote></p>
22982
22983 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
22984 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
22985 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
22986 automatically generated names. The final step to set up the school is
22987 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
22988 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
22989 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
22990 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems. All clients that should be used
22991 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
22992 group. After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
22993 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
22994 automatically.</p>
22995
22996 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
22997 enabled this weekend. You might want to give it a try.</p>
22998
22999 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
23000 hosts, one need to add the option -a. I forgot to mention this in my
23001 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
23002
23003 </div>
23004 <div class="tags">
23005
23006
23007 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
23008
23009
23010 </div>
23011 </div>
23012 <div class="padding"></div>
23013
23014 <div class="entry">
23015 <div class="title">
23016 <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>
23017 </div>
23018 <div class="date">
23019 10th January 2012
23020 </div>
23021 <div class="body">
23022 <p>In the Squeeze version of
23023 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
23024 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
23025 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
23026 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP. In
23027 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
23028 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
23029 first time.</p>
23030
23031 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
23032 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
23033 default content. By changing this value to another URL, all users get
23034 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
23035
23036 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool. It can be
23037 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
23038 new setting.</p>
23039
23040 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
23041 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
23042 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
23043
23044 </div>
23045 <div class="tags">
23046
23047
23048 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
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/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
23058 </div>
23059 <div class="date">
23060 7th January 2012
23061 </div>
23062 <div class="body">
23063 <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
23064 the second beta version of
23065 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>. If
23066 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
23067 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
23068 machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your
23069 school, check it out too. The full announcement is
23070 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
23071 on the project announcement list.</p>
23072
23073 </div>
23074 <div class="tags">
23075
23076
23077 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23078
23079
23080 </div>
23081 </div>
23082 <div class="padding"></div>
23083
23084 <div class="entry">
23085 <div class="title">
23086 <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>
23087 </div>
23088 <div class="date">
23089 3rd January 2012
23090 </div>
23091 <div class="body">
23092 <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
23093 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
23094 for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly
23095 interesting.</p>
23096
23097 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
23098 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
23099 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
23100 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
23101 scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
23102 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
23103 wrap up its tasks.</p>
23104
23105 <p>Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out
23106 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
23107 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
23108 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
23109 because I was typing.</P>
23110
23111 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
23112 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
23113 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
23114 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
23115 generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
23116 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
23117 generate entropy.</p>
23118
23119 <p>The fix is in
23120 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
23121 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
23122 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
23123 developers</a>. We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
23124
23125 </div>
23126 <div class="tags">
23127
23128
23129 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23130
23131
23132 </div>
23133 </div>
23134 <div class="padding"></div>
23135
23136 <div class="entry">
23137 <div class="title">
23138 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
23139 </div>
23140 <div class="date">
23141 21st November 2011
23142 </div>
23143 <div class="body">
23144 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
23145 around 1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
23146 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
23147 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
23148 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
23149 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
23150 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
23151 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
23152 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
23153 the tools to do so.</p>
23154
23155 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
23156 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
23157 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
23158 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
23159
23160 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
23161 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
23162 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
23163 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
23164 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
23165 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
23166 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
23167 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
23168
23169 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
23170 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
23171 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
23172
23173 <p><pre>
23174 #!/usr/bin/perl
23175 use strict;
23176 use warnings;
23177 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
23178 BEGIN {
23179 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
23180 my %rhelmodules = (
23181 'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
23182 );
23183 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
23184 eval "use $module;";
23185 if ($@) {
23186 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
23187 system("yum install -y $pkg");
23188 eval "use $module;";
23189 }
23190 }
23191 }
23192 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
23193
23194 upgrade_dell();
23195
23196 exit 0;
23197
23198 sub run_firmware_script {
23199 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
23200 unless ($script) {
23201 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
23202 exit 1
23203 }
23204 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
23205
23206 if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
23207 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
23208 } else {
23209 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
23210 }
23211 }
23212
23213 sub run_firmware_scripts {
23214 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
23215 # Run firmware packages
23216 for my $dir (@dirs) {
23217 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
23218 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
23219 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
23220 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
23221 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
23222 }
23223 closedir $dh;
23224 }
23225 }
23226
23227 sub download {
23228 my $url = shift;
23229 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
23230 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
23231 }
23232
23233 sub upgrade_dell {
23234 my @dirs;
23235 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
23236 chomp $product;
23237
23238 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
23239
23240 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
23241 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
23242
23243 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
23244 CLEANUP => 1
23245 );
23246 chdir($tmpdir);
23247 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
23248 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
23249 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
23250 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
23251 my $fwopts = "-q";
23252 if (@paths) {
23253 for my $url (@paths) {
23254 fetch_dell_fw($url);
23255 }
23256 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
23257 } else {
23258 print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
23259 print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
23260 }
23261 chdir('/');
23262 } else {
23263 print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
23264 print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
23265 }
23266 }
23267
23268 sub fetch_dell_fw {
23269 my $path = shift;
23270 my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
23271 download($url);
23272 }
23273
23274 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
23275 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
23276 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
23277 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
23278 my $filename = shift;
23279
23280 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
23281 chomp $product;
23282 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
23283
23284 print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
23285
23286 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
23287 my @paths;
23288 for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
23289 my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
23290 my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
23291 my $oscode;
23292 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
23293 $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
23294 } else {
23295 $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
23296 }
23297 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
23298 {
23299 @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
23300 }
23301 }
23302 for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
23303 my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
23304
23305 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
23306 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
23307
23308 my $cpath = $component->{path};
23309 for my $path (@paths) {
23310 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
23311 push(@paths, $cpath);
23312 }
23313 }
23314 }
23315 return @paths;
23316 }
23317 </pre>
23318
23319 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
23320 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
23321 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
23322 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
23323 outdated.</p>
23324
23325 </div>
23326 <div class="tags">
23327
23328
23329 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23330
23331
23332 </div>
23333 </div>
23334 <div class="padding"></div>
23335
23336 <div class="entry">
23337 <div class="title">
23338 <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>
23339 </div>
23340 <div class="date">
23341 7th October 2011
23342 </div>
23343 <div class="body">
23344 <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
23345 publishing houses how to handle electronic books. Surprisingly, the
23346 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
23347 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
23348 publishing houses. Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
23349 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
23350 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
23351 models.</p>
23352
23353 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
23354 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
23355 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
23356 to a better model. The idea is simple:</p>
23357
23358 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
23359 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
23360 solution to hand out free e-books. As a start, the books distributed
23361 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
23362 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
23363 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
23364 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
23365 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
23366 distributed.</p>
23367
23368 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
23369
23370 <ul>
23371
23372 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
23373 other relevant equipment.</li>
23374
23375 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
23376
23377 </ul>
23378
23379 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
23380 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
23381 visiting the library. The site would be the distribution point for
23382 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
23383 books available.</p>
23384
23385 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this? I guess it would
23386 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
23387 libraries. :)</p>
23388
23389 </div>
23390 <div class="tags">
23391
23392
23393 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>.
23394
23395
23396 </div>
23397 </div>
23398 <div class="padding"></div>
23399
23400 <div class="entry">
23401 <div class="title">
23402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
23403 </div>
23404 <div class="date">
23405 17th September 2011
23406 </div>
23407 <div class="body">
23408 <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
23409 server. It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
23410 movie collection easily available. It also make it possible to let
23411 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
23412 down. I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
23413 subtitle options intact. It also ensure that the entire film is one
23414 file on the disk. As this is for personal use, the ripping is
23415 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
23416
23417 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
23418
23419 <blockquote><pre>
23420 #!/bin/sh
23421 # apt-get install lsdvd
23422 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
23423 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
23424 </pre></blockquote>
23425
23426 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
23427 been looking for a better alternative. I have no idea why this I/O
23428 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
23429 something fishy with the DVDs in question. Or perhaps all three.</p>
23430
23431 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
23432 genisoimage. This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
23433 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
23434 back as an ISO.
23435
23436 <blockquote><pre>
23437 #!/bin/sh
23438 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
23439 set -e
23440 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
23441 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
23442 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
23443 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
23444 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
23445 </pre></blockquote>
23446
23447 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
23448
23449 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
23450 readom program from the wodim package. It is specially written to
23451 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
23452 f=image.iso</tt>. It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
23453 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
23454
23455 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
23456 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
23457 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
23458 for. Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
23459 creating a ISO image. The git source built and installed just fine in
23460 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
23461
23462 </div>
23463 <div class="tags">
23464
23465
23466 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>.
23467
23468
23469 </div>
23470 </div>
23471 <div class="padding"></div>
23472
23473 <div class="entry">
23474 <div class="title">
23475 <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>
23476 </div>
23477 <div class="date">
23478 4th August 2011
23479 </div>
23480 <div class="body">
23481 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
23482 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
23483 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
23484 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
23485 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
23486 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
23487 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>. I only have time to address one
23488 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
23489 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
23490
23491 <p><blockquote>
23492 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
23493 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
23494 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
23495 </blockquote></p>
23496
23497 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
23498 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same. I am not surprised he
23499 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
23500 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
23501 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
23502 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
23503 hard to explain.</p>
23504
23505 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
23506 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>". This means the only thing that is
23507 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
23508 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
23509 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
23510 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
23511 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
23512 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
23513 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
23514 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
23515 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
23516 mode).</p>
23517
23518 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
23519 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
23520 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>". When booting into
23521 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
23522 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>". A problem show up when
23523 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
23524 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
23525 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
23526 after visiting single user mode.</p>
23527
23528 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
23529 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
23530 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
23531 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
23532 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
23533 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
23534 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
23535 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
23536
23537 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
23538 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
23539 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
23540
23541 </div>
23542 <div class="tags">
23543
23544
23545 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>.
23546
23547
23548 </div>
23549 </div>
23550 <div class="padding"></div>
23551
23552 <div class="entry">
23553 <div class="title">
23554 <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>
23555 </div>
23556 <div class="date">
23557 30th July 2011
23558 </div>
23559 <div class="body">
23560 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
23561 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
23562 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
23563 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
23564 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
23565 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
23566 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
23567 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
23568 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
23569 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
23570 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
23571 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
23572 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
23573
23574 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
23575 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
23576 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
23577 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
23578 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
23579 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
23580 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
23581 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
23582 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
23583
23584 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
23585 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
23586 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
23587 is presented.</p>
23588
23589 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
23590 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
23591 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
23592 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
23593 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
23594 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
23595 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
23596 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
23597 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
23598 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
23599 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
23600 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
23601 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
23602 find time to push this forward.</p>
23603
23604 </div>
23605 <div class="tags">
23606
23607
23608 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>.
23609
23610
23611 </div>
23612 </div>
23613 <div class="padding"></div>
23614
23615 <div class="entry">
23616 <div class="title">
23617 <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>
23618 </div>
23619 <div class="date">
23620 29th July 2011
23621 </div>
23622 <div class="body">
23623 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
23624 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
23625 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
23626 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
23627 issues.</p>
23628
23629 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
23630 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
23631 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
23632
23633 <ol>
23634
23635 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
23636 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
23637 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
23638 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
23639 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
23640 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
23641 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
23642 Debian.</li>
23643
23644 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
23645 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
23646 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
23647 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
23648 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
23649 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
23650 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
23651 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
23652 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
23653 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
23654 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
23655 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
23656 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
23657
23658 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
23659 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
23660 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
23661 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
23662 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
23663 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
23664 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
23665 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
23666 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
23667 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
23668
23669 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
23670 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
23671 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
23672 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
23673 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
23674 latter behaviour.</li>
23675
23676 </ol>
23677
23678 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
23679 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
23680 it do not matter much.</p>
23681
23682 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
23683 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
23684 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
23685
23686 </div>
23687 <div class="tags">
23688
23689
23690 Tags: <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>.
23691
23692
23693 </div>
23694 </div>
23695 <div class="padding"></div>
23696
23697 <div class="entry">
23698 <div class="title">
23699 <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>
23700 </div>
23701 <div class="date">
23702 26th July 2011
23703 </div>
23704 <div class="body">
23705 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
23706 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
23707 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
23708 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
23709 security support for a few years.</p>
23710
23711 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
23712 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
23713 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
23714 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
23715 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
23716 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
23717 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
23718 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
23719 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
23720 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
23721 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
23722 easier in the future.</p>
23723
23724 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
23725 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
23726 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
23727 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
23728 do not have time for.</p>
23729
23730 </div>
23731 <div class="tags">
23732
23733
23734 Tags: <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>.
23735
23736
23737 </div>
23738 </div>
23739 <div class="padding"></div>
23740
23741 <div class="entry">
23742 <div class="title">
23743 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
23744 </div>
23745 <div class="date">
23746 20th June 2011
23747 </div>
23748 <div class="body">
23749 <p>Reading
23750 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
23751 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
23752 parts of the
23753 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
23754 and
23755 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
23756 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
23757 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs. Whenever I take
23758 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
23759
23760 </div>
23761 <div class="tags">
23762
23763
23764 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>.
23765
23766
23767 </div>
23768 </div>
23769 <div class="padding"></div>
23770
23771 <div class="entry">
23772 <div class="title">
23773 <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>
23774 </div>
23775 <div class="date">
23776 30th April 2011
23777 </div>
23778 <div class="body">
23779 <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
23780 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
23781 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
23782 work. It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
23783 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
23784 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
23785 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
23786 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
23787 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
23788 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
23789
23790 <p>Where is it? Visit
23791 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
23792 to have a look. Please send feedback to the
23793 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
23794 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
23795
23796 </div>
23797 <div class="tags">
23798
23799
23800 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>.
23801
23802
23803 </div>
23804 </div>
23805 <div class="padding"></div>
23806
23807 <div class="entry">
23808 <div class="title">
23809 <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>
23810 </div>
23811 <div class="date">
23812 29th April 2011
23813 </div>
23814 <div class="body">
23815 <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
23816 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
23817 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
23818 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
23819 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
23820 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
23821 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
23822 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
23823 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
23824 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
23825 FixMyStreet. The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
23826 to get a draft limping along. In the process, I have discovered a few
23827 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
23828
23829 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
23830 handling in the specification. The specification seem to assume all
23831 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
23832 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there. To be
23833 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
23834 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
23835 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
23836 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
23837 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
23838 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
23839 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
23840 know which language to use when writing a problem report. I suspect
23841 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
23842
23843 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
23844 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet. One issue I
23845 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
23846 each category. The specification do not state that the identifier
23847 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
23848 here. In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
23849 category. As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
23850 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
23851 it.</p>
23852
23853 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
23854 differ in a key part. FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
23855 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title. I'm not
23856 quite sure how to best handle this yet. When asking for a FixMyStreet
23857 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
23858 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
23859 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
23860
23861 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
23862 near a geographic location. I believe this is important if one is to
23863 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units. The specification
23864 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
23865 and range= options.</p>
23866
23867 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
23868 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
23869 to assume only one administration. For FixMyStreet, this mean a
23870 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
23871 available depend on the location of the problem. Not quite sure how
23872 to best handle this. I've noticed
23873 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
23874 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
23875 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
23876 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
23877
23878 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
23879 up with the open311 developer group. I really wish they had a email
23880 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
23881 discussions instead of only
23882 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>. Oh,
23883 well. That will probably resolve itself, one way or another. I've
23884 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
23885 seem to reply to my questions there. This make me wonder if I just
23886 fail to understand how the open311 community work. It sure do not
23887 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
23888
23889 </div>
23890 <div class="tags">
23891
23892
23893 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>.
23894
23895
23896 </div>
23897 </div>
23898 <div class="padding"></div>
23899
23900 <div class="entry">
23901 <div class="title">
23902 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
23903 </div>
23904 <div class="date">
23905 6th April 2011
23906 </div>
23907 <div class="body">
23908 <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
23909 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
23910 A few days ago the project
23911 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
23912 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code. I hope many
23913 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
23914 into Gnash.</p>
23915
23916 </div>
23917 <div class="tags">
23918
23919
23920 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>.
23921
23922
23923 </div>
23924 </div>
23925 <div class="padding"></div>
23926
23927 <div class="entry">
23928 <div class="title">
23929 <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>
23930 </div>
23931 <div class="date">
23932 3rd April 2011
23933 </div>
23934 <div class="body">
23935 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
23936 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
23937 update in English.</p>
23938
23939 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
23940 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
23941 of the British service
23942 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
23943 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
23944 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
23945 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
23946 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
23947 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
23948 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
23949 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
23950 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
23951 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
23952 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
23953 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
23954 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
23955
23956 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
23957 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
23958 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
23959 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
23960 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
23961 public infrastructure.</p>
23962
23963 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
23964 such service?</p>
23965
23966 </div>
23967 <div class="tags">
23968
23969
23970 Tags: <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>.
23971
23972
23973 </div>
23974 </div>
23975 <div class="padding"></div>
23976
23977 <div class="entry">
23978 <div class="title">
23979 <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>
23980 </div>
23981 <div class="date">
23982 28th January 2011
23983 </div>
23984 <div class="body">
23985 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
23986 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
23987 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
23988 available on the Internet, and check our locally
23989 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
23990 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
23991 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
23992 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
23993 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
23994 out which security holes were present in our free software
23995 collection.</p>
23996
23997 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
23998 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
23999 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
24000 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
24001 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
24002 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
24003 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
24004 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
24005 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
24006 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
24007 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
24008 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
24009 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
24010 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
24011 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
24012 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
24013
24014 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
24015 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
24016 check out, one could look up
24017 <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
24018 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
24019 The most recent one is
24020 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
24021 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
24022 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
24023
24024 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
24025 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
24026 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
24027 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
24028 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
24029 security issues out.</p>
24030
24031 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
24032 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
24033 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
24034 RHEL is providing
24035 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
24036 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
24037 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
24038
24039 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
24040 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
24041 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
24042 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
24043 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
24044 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
24045 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
24046 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
24047 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
24048 established soon.</p>
24049
24050 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
24051 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
24052 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
24053 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
24054 for their packages.</p>
24055
24056 </div>
24057 <div class="tags">
24058
24059
24060 Tags: <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>.
24061
24062
24063 </div>
24064 </div>
24065 <div class="padding"></div>
24066
24067 <div class="entry">
24068 <div class="title">
24069 <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>
24070 </div>
24071 <div class="date">
24072 23rd January 2011
24073 </div>
24074 <div class="body">
24075 <p>In the
24076 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
24077 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
24078 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
24079 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
24080 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
24081 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
24082 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
24083 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
24084 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
24085 one of my machines like this:</p>
24086
24087 <pre>
24088 loaded modules:
24089 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
24090 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
24091 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
24092 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
24093 10de:03ec pata_amd
24094 10de:03f6 sata_nv
24095 1022:1103 k8temp
24096 109e:036e bttv
24097 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
24098 11ab:4364 sky2
24099 </pre>
24100
24101 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
24102 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
24103
24104 <pre>
24105 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
24106 echo loaded pci modules:
24107 (
24108 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
24109 for address in * ; do
24110 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
24111 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
24112 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
24113 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
24114 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
24115 echo "$id $module"
24116 fi
24117 fi
24118 done
24119 )
24120 echo
24121 fi
24122 </pre>
24123
24124 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
24125 mappings:</p>
24126
24127 <pre>
24128 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
24129 echo loaded usb modules:
24130 (
24131 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
24132 for address in * ; do
24133 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
24134 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
24135 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
24136 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
24137 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
24138 if [ "$id" ] ; then
24139 echo "$id $module"
24140 fi
24141 fi
24142 fi
24143 done
24144 )
24145 echo
24146 fi
24147 </pre>
24148
24149 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
24150 well.</p>
24151
24152 </div>
24153 <div class="tags">
24154
24155
24156 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24157
24158
24159 </div>
24160 </div>
24161 <div class="padding"></div>
24162
24163 <div class="entry">
24164 <div class="title">
24165 <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>
24166 </div>
24167 <div class="date">
24168 16th January 2011
24169 </div>
24170 <div class="body">
24171 <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
24172 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM. Most video sites
24173 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora. Interestingly enough,
24174 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
24175 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
24176 the Wikipedia article on
24177 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
24178 this is not true. Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
24179 different browsers there. The format supported by most browsers is
24180 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
24181 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
24182 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
24183 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
24184 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
24185 Firefox. H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
24186 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
24187 Explorer. Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
24188 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
24189
24190 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
24191 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
24192 HTML5 video tag. Of course to reach all those without a browser
24193 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms. In
24194 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
24195 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
24196 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
24197 Theora. This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
24198 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
24199 from last week</a>.</p>
24200
24201 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
24202 the least supported is simple. Implementing and using H.264
24203 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
24204 are incompatible with free software licensing. If you believed H.264
24205 was without royalties and license terms, check out
24206 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
24207 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
24208
24209 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
24210 available from
24211 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
24212 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look. I'm not aware of a
24213 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
24214
24215 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
24216 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
24217 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
24218 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
24219
24220 </div>
24221 <div class="tags">
24222
24223
24224 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>.
24225
24226
24227 </div>
24228 </div>
24229 <div class="padding"></div>
24230
24231 <div class="entry">
24232 <div class="title">
24233 <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>
24234 </div>
24235 <div class="date">
24236 12th January 2011
24237 </div>
24238 <div class="body">
24239 <p>Today I discovered
24240 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
24241 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
24242 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
24243 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
24244 the browser. The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
24245 open" codec technology. If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
24246 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
24247 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
24248 Free That Matters</a>". It is not free of cost for creators of video
24249 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
24250 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
24251 licensing the patents needed for H.264. Some background information
24252 on the Google announcement is available from
24253 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
24254 A good read. :)</p>
24255
24256 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
24257 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
24258 the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open
24259 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
24260 for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two
24261 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some
24262 browsers support H.264, and others support
24263 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
24264 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
24265 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
24266 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
24267 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
24268 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
24269 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
24270 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
24271
24272 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
24273 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
24274 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
24275 the mind set</a> of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
24276 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
24277 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
24278 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
24279
24280 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
24281 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This
24282 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
24283 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
24284 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it
24285 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
24286 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
24287
24288 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
24289 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
24290 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV
24291 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
24292 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
24293 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
24294 publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
24295
24296 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the
24297 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
24298 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
24299 perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
24300 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
24301 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
24302 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
24303 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
24304 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
24305 video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be
24306 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
24307 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
24308 I guess time will tell.</p>
24309
24310 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
24311 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
24312 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
24313
24314 </div>
24315 <div class="tags">
24316
24317
24318 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>.
24319
24320
24321 </div>
24322 </div>
24323 <div class="padding"></div>
24324
24325 <div class="entry">
24326 <div class="title">
24327 <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>
24328 </div>
24329 <div class="date">
24330 30th December 2010
24331 </div>
24332 <div class="body">
24333 <p>After trying to
24334 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
24335 Ogg Theora</a> to
24336 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
24337 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
24338 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
24339 this. As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
24340 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
24341 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others. But to be able to complete this in a
24342 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
24343
24344 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
24345 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
24346 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
24347 to help out. The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
24348 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
24349 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
24350 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
24351
24352 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do. Do not be
24353 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
24354
24355 </div>
24356 <div class="tags">
24357
24358
24359 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>.
24360
24361
24362 </div>
24363 </div>
24364 <div class="padding"></div>
24365
24366 <div class="entry">
24367 <div class="title">
24368 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
24369 </div>
24370 <div class="date">
24371 27th December 2010
24372 </div>
24373 <div class="body">
24374 <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
24375 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
24376 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
24377 the term has been decided by Digistan. The term "Open Standard" has
24378 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
24379 about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best
24380 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
24381 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
24382
24383 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
24384 standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not
24385 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
24386 complete survey. More definitions are available on the
24387 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
24388 page</a>.</p>
24389
24390 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
24391 Interoperability Framework version 1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA
24392 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
24393 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
24394 their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it
24395 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
24396 specification on equal terms.</p>
24397
24398 <blockquote>
24399
24400 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
24401 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
24402 open standard:</p>
24403
24404 <ul>
24405
24406 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
24407 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
24408 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
24409 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
24410
24411 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
24412 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
24413 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
24414 nominal fee.</li>
24415
24416 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
24417 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
24418 free basis.</li>
24419
24420 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
24421
24422 </ul>
24423 </blockquote>
24424
24425 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
24426 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
24427 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
24428 definition</a> in 2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as
24429 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
24430 definition of a open standard</a>. Another from a different part of
24431 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
24432
24433 <blockquote>
24434
24435 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
24436
24437 <ol>
24438
24439 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
24440 tilgængelig.</li>
24441
24442 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
24443 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
24444
24445 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
24446 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
24447
24448 </ol>
24449
24450 </blockquote>
24451
24452 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
24453 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
24454
24455 <blockquote>
24456
24457 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
24458
24459 <ol>
24460
24461 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
24462 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
24463
24464 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
24465 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
24466 Standard themselves;</li>
24467
24468 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
24469 any party or in any business model;</li>
24470
24471 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
24472 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
24473 parties;</li>
24474
24475 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
24476 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
24477 parties.</li>
24478
24479 </ol>
24480
24481 </blockquote>
24482
24483 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
24484 its
24485 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
24486 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
24487
24488 <blockquote>
24489 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
24490
24491 <ul>
24492
24493 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
24494 democratic:
24495
24496 <ul>
24497
24498 <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
24499 participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
24500 imposed by the organization under which it is developed
24501 and managed.</li>
24502
24503 <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
24504 method, can be changed through input from all
24505 participants.</li>
24506
24507 <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
24508 the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
24509
24510 <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
24511 and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
24512
24513 <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
24514 public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
24515 comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
24516
24517 </ul>
24518
24519 </li>
24520
24521 </ul>
24522
24523 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
24524 <ul>
24525
24526 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
24527 and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
24528 implementations to the interface described in the standard without
24529 undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs,
24530 protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
24531
24532 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
24533 a technical or economic barriers</li>
24534
24535 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
24536 interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
24537 program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
24538 programs and mutually to use the information which has been
24539 exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
24540 file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
24541 conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
24542 computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
24543 intended to function.</li>
24544
24545 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
24546 standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
24547 must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
24548
24549 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
24550 fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
24551 perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
24552 sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are
24553 terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
24554 outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
24555 patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
24556 only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
24557
24558 <ul>
24559
24560 <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
24561 licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
24562 (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
24563
24564 <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
24565 or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
24566 essential to practice that standard (also known as a
24567 "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
24568
24569 <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
24570 licensor</li>
24571
24572 </ul>
24573 </li>
24574
24575 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
24576 implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
24577 or restricted licensing terms</li>
24578
24579 </ul>
24580
24581 </blockquote>
24582
24583 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
24584 there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for
24585 open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in
24586 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
24587 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
24588 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
24589 competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we
24590 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
24591 Standards.</p>
24592
24593 </div>
24594 <div class="tags">
24595
24596
24597 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>.
24598
24599
24600 </div>
24601 </div>
24602 <div class="padding"></div>
24603
24604 <div class="entry">
24605 <div class="title">
24606 <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>
24607 </div>
24608 <div class="date">
24609 25th December 2010
24610 </div>
24611 <div class="body">
24612 <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
24613 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
24614
24615 <blockquote>
24616
24617 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
24618 as follows:</p>
24619
24620 <ol>
24621
24622 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
24623 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
24624 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
24625
24626 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
24627 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
24628 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
24629 parties.</li>
24630
24631 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
24632 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
24633 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
24634
24635 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
24636 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
24637
24638 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
24639
24640 </ol>
24641
24642 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
24643 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
24644 products based on the standard.</p>
24645 </blockquote>
24646
24647 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
24648 and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short
24649 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the
24650 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
24651 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
24652 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
24653 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
24654 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
24655
24656 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
24657
24658 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
24659 Ogg Theora specification. It can be argued that the
24660 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
24661 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
24662 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
24663 obvious that this is a real risk. One issue with the Xiph
24664 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
24665 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web. I've
24666 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
24667 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
24668 where is is spent in the foundation. It is thus not obvious for an
24669 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
24670 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
24671 specification. But it seem unlikely.</p>
24672
24673 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
24674
24675 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
24676 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled. If Xiph foundation is
24677 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
24678 documentation indicating this.</p>
24679
24680 <p>According to
24681 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
24682 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
24683 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
24684 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
24685 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
24686 report is correct.</p>
24687
24688 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
24689
24690 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
24691 container format</a> and both the
24692 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
24693 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
24694 the web. This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
24695
24696 <blockquote>
24697
24698 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
24699 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
24700 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
24701 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
24702 specification compliance.
24703
24704 </blockquote>
24705
24706 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
24707 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
24708 this is the term:<p>
24709
24710 <blockquote>
24711
24712 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
24713 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
24714 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
24715 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
24716 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
24717 included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
24718 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
24719 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
24720 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
24721 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
24722 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
24723 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
24724
24725 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
24726 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
24727 </blockquote>
24728
24729 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
24730 this term seem to be fulfilled. There might be a problem with the
24731 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
24732 thus reuse it in other specifications. Not quite sure if that is a
24733 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
24734
24735 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
24736
24737 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
24738 Theora format.
24739 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
24740 and
24741 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
24742 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
24743 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
24744 them. Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
24745 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
24746 without paying any royalties. For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
24747 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
24748 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
24749
24750 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
24751
24752 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
24753
24754 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
24755
24756 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
24757 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation. Given the
24758 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
24759 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
24760 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
24761 this.</p>
24762
24763 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
24764 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
24765
24766 </div>
24767 <div class="tags">
24768
24769
24770 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>.
24771
24772
24773 </div>
24774 </div>
24775 <div class="padding"></div>
24776
24777 <div class="entry">
24778 <div class="title">
24779 <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>
24780 </div>
24781 <div class="date">
24782 25th December 2010
24783 </div>
24784 <div class="body">
24785 <p>A few days ago
24786 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
24787 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
24788 2.0 of
24789 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
24790 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
24791 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
24792 Nothing very surprising there, given
24793 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
24794 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
24795 this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of
24796 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
24797 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
24798 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
24799 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
24800 definition from Digistan</A>. Version 2 have removed the open
24801 standard definition from its content.</p>
24802
24803 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
24804 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
24805 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
24806 in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a
24807 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
24808 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
24809 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future. Some
24810 background information about that story is available in
24811 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
24812 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
24813
24814 <blockquote>
24815 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
24816 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
24817 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
24818
24819 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
24820
24821 <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>
24822
24823 <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>
24824
24825 <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>
24826
24827 <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>
24828
24829 <p>
24830 <ul>
24831 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
24832 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
24833 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
24834 </ul>
24835 </p>
24836
24837 <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>
24838
24839 <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>
24840
24841 <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>
24842
24843 <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>
24844
24845 <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>
24846
24847
24848 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
24849 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
24850 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
24851 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
24852 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
24853 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
24854
24855 </p>
24856
24857 <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>
24858
24859 <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>
24860
24861 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
24862
24863 <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>
24864
24865 <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>
24866
24867 <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>
24868
24869 <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>
24870
24871 <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>
24872
24873 <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>
24874
24875 <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>
24876
24877 <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>
24878
24879 <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>
24880
24881 <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>
24882
24883 <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>
24884
24885 <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>
24886
24887 <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>
24888
24889 <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>
24890
24891 <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>
24892
24893 <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>
24894
24895 <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>
24896
24897 <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>
24898
24899 <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>
24900
24901 <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>
24902
24903 <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>
24904
24905 <p>On security:</p>
24906
24907 <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>
24908
24909 <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>
24910
24911 <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>
24912
24913 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
24914
24915 <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>
24916
24917 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
24918
24919 <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>
24920
24921 <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>
24922
24923 <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>
24924
24925 <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>
24926
24927 <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>
24928
24929 <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>
24930
24931 <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>
24932
24933 <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>
24934
24935 <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>
24936
24937 <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>
24938
24939 <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>
24940
24941 <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>
24942
24943 <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>
24944
24945 <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>
24946
24947 <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>
24948
24949 <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>
24950
24951 <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>
24952
24953 <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>
24954
24955 <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>
24956
24957 <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>
24958
24959 <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>
24960
24961 <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>
24962
24963 <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>
24964
24965 <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>
24966
24967 <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>
24968
24969 <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>
24970
24971 <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>
24972
24973 <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>
24974
24975 <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>
24976
24977 <p>Cordially,<br>
24978 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
24979 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
24980 </blockquote>
24981
24982 </div>
24983 <div class="tags">
24984
24985
24986 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>.
24987
24988
24989 </div>
24990 </div>
24991 <div class="padding"></div>
24992
24993 <div class="entry">
24994 <div class="title">
24995 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
24996 </div>
24997 <div class="date">
24998 25th December 2010
24999 </div>
25000 <div class="body">
25001 <p>Half a year ago I
25002 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
25003 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
25004 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
25005 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
25006
25007 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
25008 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
25009 different Office implementations handle different ODF features. Sad
25010 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
25011 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
25012 for OfficeShots users yet). I am glad to see that the ODF community
25013 got such a great test tool available.</p>
25014
25015 </div>
25016 <div class="tags">
25017
25018
25019 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>.
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/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
25029 </div>
25030 <div class="date">
25031 22nd December 2010
25032 </div>
25033 <div class="body">
25034 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
25035 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
25036 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
25037 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
25038 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
25039 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
25040 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
25041 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
25042 university.</p>
25043
25044 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
25045 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
25046 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
25047 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
25048 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
25049 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
25050 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
25051 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
25052
25053 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
25054 I perform on a new model.</p>
25055
25056 <ul>
25057
25058 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
25059 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
25060 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
25061
25062 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
25063 installation, X.org is working.</li>
25064
25065 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
25066 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
25067 reported by the program.</li>
25068
25069 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
25070 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
25071 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
25072 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
25073 normally test this by playing
25074 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
25075 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
25076
25077 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
25078 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
25079
25080 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
25081 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
25082
25083 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
25084 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
25085
25086 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
25087 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
25088 few.</li>
25089
25090 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
25091 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
25092 notice this.</li>
25093
25094 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
25095 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
25096 resume.</li>
25097
25098 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
25099 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
25100 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
25101 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
25102 not.</li>
25103
25104 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
25105 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
25106 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
25107 existence.</li>
25108
25109 </ul>
25110
25111 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
25112 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
25113 the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
25114 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
25115 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you
25116 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
25117 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
25118 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.</p>
25119
25120 </div>
25121 <div class="tags">
25122
25123
25124 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>.
25125
25126
25127 </div>
25128 </div>
25129 <div class="padding"></div>
25130
25131 <div class="entry">
25132 <div class="title">
25133 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
25134 </div>
25135 <div class="date">
25136 11th December 2010
25137 </div>
25138 <div class="body">
25139 <p>As I continue to explore
25140 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
25141 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
25142 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.</p>
25143
25144 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
25145 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
25146 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
25147 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
25148 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
25149 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
25150 all transactions. There I can see that my address
25151 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
25152 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
25153 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
25154 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
25155 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
25156 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
25157 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
25158 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
25159 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
25160 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
25161 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
25162 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
25163 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
25164
25165 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
25166 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
25167 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
25168 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
25169 If the Skolelinux foundation
25170 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
25171 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
25172 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
25173 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
25174 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
25175 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
25176 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
25177 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
25178
25179 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
25180 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
25181 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
25182 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
25183 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
25184 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
25185 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
25186 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
25187 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
25188 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
25189 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
25190 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
25191 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
25192 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
25193 currencies.</p>
25194
25195 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
25196 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
25197 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
25198 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50
25199 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
25200 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
25201 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
25202 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
25203 BitCoins. Check out
25204 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
25205 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
25206 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
25207 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
25208 yet.</p>
25209
25210 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
25211 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
25212 criticism</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
25213 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
25214 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
25215
25216 </div>
25217 <div class="tags">
25218
25219
25220 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>.
25221
25222
25223 </div>
25224 </div>
25225 <div class="padding"></div>
25226
25227 <div class="entry">
25228 <div class="title">
25229 <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>
25230 </div>
25231 <div class="date">
25232 10th December 2010
25233 </div>
25234 <div class="body">
25235 <p>With this weeks lawless
25236 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
25237 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
25238 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
25239 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
25240 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
25241 A blog post from
25242 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
25243 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
25244 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
25245 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>. I got
25246 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
25247 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
25248 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
25249
25250 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
25251 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
25252 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
25253 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
25254 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
25255 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
25256 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
25257 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
25258 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
25259 Debian</a> soon.</p>
25260
25261 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
25262 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
25263 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
25264 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
25265 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
25266 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
25267 you can even get
25268 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
25269 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
25270 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
25271 on the current exchange rates.</p>
25272
25273 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
25274 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
25275 donations to the address
25276 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>. Thank you!</p>
25277
25278 </div>
25279 <div class="tags">
25280
25281
25282 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>.
25283
25284
25285 </div>
25286 </div>
25287 <div class="padding"></div>
25288
25289 <div class="entry">
25290 <div class="title">
25291 <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>
25292 </div>
25293 <div class="date">
25294 9th December 2010
25295 </div>
25296 <div class="body">
25297 <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
25298 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
25299 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
25300 get their own 3D printer. They wanted to learn from me based on my
25301 work in the area. After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
25302 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
25303 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon. I look
25304 forward to see how this goes. This monday their volunteer driver
25305 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
25306 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
25307 operational.</p>
25308
25309 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
25310 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational. I really look
25311 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
25312 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>. I even got
25313 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
25314 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
25315 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
25316
25317 </div>
25318 <div class="tags">
25319
25320
25321 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>.
25322
25323
25324 </div>
25325 </div>
25326 <div class="padding"></div>
25327
25328 <div class="entry">
25329 <div class="title">
25330 <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>
25331 </div>
25332 <div class="date">
25333 29th November 2010
25334 </div>
25335 <div class="body">
25336 <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
25337 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
25338 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I
25339 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
25340 Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in
25341 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
25342
25343 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
25344 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
25345 will hold its
25346 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
25347 for 2010</a>. Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
25348 people registered as members. Last year 32 members cast their vote in
25349 the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to
25350 vote this year.</p>
25351
25352 </div>
25353 <div class="tags">
25354
25355
25356 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25357
25358
25359 </div>
25360 </div>
25361 <div class="padding"></div>
25362
25363 <div class="entry">
25364 <div class="title">
25365 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
25366 </div>
25367 <div class="date">
25368 27th November 2010
25369 </div>
25370 <div class="body">
25371 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
25372 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
25373 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
25374 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
25375 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
25376 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
25377 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
25378 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
25379
25380 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
25381 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
25382 Edu/Skolelinux</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
25383 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
25384 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
25385 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
25386 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
25387 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
25388 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
25389 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
25390 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
25391
25392 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
25393 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
25394 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
25395 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
25396 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
25397 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
25398 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
25399 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
25400 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
25401 what is going on.</p>
25402
25403 </div>
25404 <div class="tags">
25405
25406
25407 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>.
25408
25409
25410 </div>
25411 </div>
25412 <div class="padding"></div>
25413
25414 <div class="entry">
25415 <div class="title">
25416 <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>
25417 </div>
25418 <div class="date">
25419 22nd November 2010
25420 </div>
25421 <div class="body">
25422 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
25423 upgrade testing of the
25424 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
25425 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
25426 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
25427 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
25428
25429 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
25430
25431 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25432
25433 <blockquote><p>
25434 apache2.2-bin
25435 aptdaemon
25436 baobab
25437 binfmt-support
25438 browser-plugin-gnash
25439 cheese-common
25440 cli-common
25441 cups-pk-helper
25442 dmz-cursor-theme
25443 empathy
25444 empathy-common
25445 freedesktop-sound-theme
25446 freeglut3
25447 gconf-defaults-service
25448 gdm-themes
25449 gedit-plugins
25450 geoclue
25451 geoclue-hostip
25452 geoclue-localnet
25453 geoclue-manual
25454 geoclue-yahoo
25455 gnash
25456 gnash-common
25457 gnome
25458 gnome-backgrounds
25459 gnome-cards-data
25460 gnome-codec-install
25461 gnome-core
25462 gnome-desktop-environment
25463 gnome-disk-utility
25464 gnome-screenshot
25465 gnome-search-tool
25466 gnome-session-canberra
25467 gnome-system-log
25468 gnome-themes-extras
25469 gnome-themes-more
25470 gnome-user-share
25471 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
25472 gstreamer0.10-tools
25473 gtk2-engines
25474 gtk2-engines-pixbuf
25475 gtk2-engines-smooth
25476 hamster-applet
25477 libapache2-mod-dnssd
25478 libapr1
25479 libaprutil1
25480 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
25481 libaprutil1-ldap
25482 libart2.0-cil
25483 libboost-date-time1.42.0
25484 libboost-python1.42.0
25485 libboost-thread1.42.0
25486 libchamplain-0.4-0
25487 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
25488 libcheese-gtk18
25489 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
25490 libcryptui0
25491 libdiscid0
25492 libelf1
25493 libepc-1.0-2
25494 libepc-common
25495 libepc-ui-1.0-2
25496 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
25497 libfreerdp0
25498 libgconf2.0-cil
25499 libgdata-common
25500 libgdata7
25501 libgdu-gtk0
25502 libgee2
25503 libgeoclue0
25504 libgexiv2-0
25505 libgif4
25506 libglade2.0-cil
25507 libglib2.0-cil
25508 libgmime2.4-cil
25509 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
25510 libgnome2.24-cil
25511 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
25512 libgpod-common
25513 libgpod4
25514 libgtk2.0-cil
25515 libgtkglext1
25516 libgtksourceview2.0-common
25517 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
25518 libmono-addins0.2-cil
25519 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
25520 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
25521 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
25522 libmono-posix2.0-cil
25523 libmono-security2.0-cil
25524 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
25525 libmono-system2.0-cil
25526 libmtp8
25527 libmusicbrainz3-6
25528 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
25529 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
25530 libopal3.6.8
25531 libpolkit-gtk-1-0
25532 libpt2.6.7
25533 libpython2.6
25534 librpm1
25535 librpmio1
25536 libsdl1.2debian
25537 libsrtp0
25538 libssh-4
25539 libtelepathy-farsight0
25540 libtelepathy-glib0
25541 libtidy-0.99-0
25542 media-player-info
25543 mesa-utils
25544 mono-2.0-gac
25545 mono-gac
25546 mono-runtime
25547 nautilus-sendto
25548 nautilus-sendto-empathy
25549 p7zip-full
25550 pkg-config
25551 python-aptdaemon
25552 python-aptdaemon-gtk
25553 python-axiom
25554 python-beautifulsoup
25555 python-bugbuddy
25556 python-clientform
25557 python-coherence
25558 python-configobj
25559 python-crypto
25560 python-cupshelpers
25561 python-elementtree
25562 python-epsilon
25563 python-evolution
25564 python-feedparser
25565 python-gdata
25566 python-gdbm
25567 python-gst0.10
25568 python-gtkglext1
25569 python-gtksourceview2
25570 python-httplib2
25571 python-louie
25572 python-mako
25573 python-markupsafe
25574 python-mechanize
25575 python-nevow
25576 python-notify
25577 python-opengl
25578 python-openssl
25579 python-pam
25580 python-pkg-resources
25581 python-pyasn1
25582 python-pysqlite2
25583 python-rdflib
25584 python-serial
25585 python-tagpy
25586 python-twisted-bin
25587 python-twisted-conch
25588 python-twisted-core
25589 python-twisted-web
25590 python-utidylib
25591 python-webkit
25592 python-xdg
25593 python-zope.interface
25594 remmina
25595 remmina-plugin-data
25596 remmina-plugin-rdp
25597 remmina-plugin-vnc
25598 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
25599 rhythmbox-plugins
25600 rpm-common
25601 rpm2cpio
25602 seahorse-plugins
25603 shotwell
25604 software-center
25605 system-config-printer-udev
25606 telepathy-gabble
25607 telepathy-mission-control-5
25608 telepathy-salut
25609 tomboy
25610 totem
25611 totem-coherence
25612 totem-mozilla
25613 totem-plugins
25614 transmission-common
25615 xdg-user-dirs
25616 xdg-user-dirs-gtk
25617 xserver-xephyr
25618 </p></blockquote>
25619
25620 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
25621
25622 <blockquote><p>
25623 cheese
25624 ekiga
25625 eog
25626 epiphany-extensions
25627 evolution-exchange
25628 fast-user-switch-applet
25629 file-roller
25630 gcalctool
25631 gconf-editor
25632 gdm
25633 gedit
25634 gedit-common
25635 gnome-games
25636 gnome-games-data
25637 gnome-nettool
25638 gnome-system-tools
25639 gnome-themes
25640 gnuchess
25641 gucharmap
25642 guile-1.8-libs
25643 libavahi-ui0
25644 libdmx1
25645 libgalago3
25646 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
25647 libgtksourceview2.0-0
25648 liblircclient0
25649 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
25650 libspeexdsp1
25651 libsvga1
25652 rhythmbox
25653 seahorse
25654 sound-juicer
25655 system-config-printer
25656 totem-common
25657 transmission-gtk
25658 vinagre
25659 vino
25660 </p></blockquote>
25661
25662 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
25663
25664 <blockquote><p>
25665 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
25666 </p></blockquote>
25667
25668 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
25669
25670 <blockquote><p>
25671 [nothing]
25672 </p></blockquote>
25673
25674 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
25675
25676 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25677
25678 <blockquote><p>
25679 ksmserver
25680 </p></blockquote>
25681
25682 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
25683
25684 <blockquote><p>
25685 kwin
25686 network-manager-kde
25687 </p></blockquote>
25688
25689 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
25690
25691 <blockquote><p>
25692 arts
25693 dolphin
25694 freespacenotifier
25695 google-gadgets-gst
25696 google-gadgets-xul
25697 kappfinder
25698 kcalc
25699 kcharselect
25700 kde-core
25701 kde-plasma-desktop
25702 kde-standard
25703 kde-window-manager
25704 kdeartwork
25705 kdeartwork-emoticons
25706 kdeartwork-style
25707 kdeartwork-theme-icon
25708 kdebase
25709 kdebase-apps
25710 kdebase-workspace
25711 kdebase-workspace-bin
25712 kdebase-workspace-data
25713 kdeeject
25714 kdelibs
25715 kdeplasma-addons
25716 kdeutils
25717 kdewallpapers
25718 kdf
25719 kfloppy
25720 kgpg
25721 khelpcenter4
25722 kinfocenter
25723 konq-plugins-l10n
25724 konqueror-nsplugins
25725 kscreensaver
25726 kscreensaver-xsavers
25727 ktimer
25728 kwrite
25729 libgle3
25730 libkde4-ruby1.8
25731 libkonq5
25732 libkonq5-templates
25733 libnetpbm10
25734 libplasma-ruby
25735 libplasma-ruby1.8
25736 libqt4-ruby1.8
25737 marble-data
25738 marble-plugins
25739 netpbm
25740 nuvola-icon-theme
25741 plasma-dataengines-workspace
25742 plasma-desktop
25743 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
25744 plasma-runners-addons
25745 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
25746 plasma-scriptengine-python
25747 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
25748 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
25749 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
25750 plasma-scriptengines
25751 plasma-wallpapers-addons
25752 plasma-widget-folderview
25753 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
25754 ruby
25755 sweeper
25756 update-notifier-kde
25757 xscreensaver-data-extra
25758 xscreensaver-gl
25759 xscreensaver-gl-extra
25760 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
25761 </p></blockquote>
25762
25763 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
25764
25765 <blockquote><p>
25766 ark
25767 google-gadgets-common
25768 google-gadgets-qt
25769 htdig
25770 kate
25771 kdebase-bin
25772 kdebase-data
25773 kdepasswd
25774 kfind
25775 klipper
25776 konq-plugins
25777 konqueror
25778 ksysguard
25779 ksysguardd
25780 libarchive1
25781 libcln6
25782 libeet1
25783 libeina-svn-06
25784 libggadget-1.0-0b
25785 libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
25786 libgps19
25787 libkdecorations4
25788 libkephal4
25789 libkonq4
25790 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
25791 libkscreensaver5
25792 libksgrd4
25793 libksignalplotter4
25794 libkunitconversion4
25795 libkwineffects1a
25796 libmarblewidget4
25797 libntrack-qt4-1
25798 libntrack0
25799 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
25800 libplasmaclock4a
25801 libplasmagenericshell4
25802 libprocesscore4a
25803 libprocessui4a
25804 libqalculate5
25805 libqedje0a
25806 libqtruby4shared2
25807 libqzion0a
25808 libruby1.8
25809 libscim8c2a
25810 libsmokekdecore4-3
25811 libsmokekdeui4-3
25812 libsmokekfile3
25813 libsmokekhtml3
25814 libsmokekio3
25815 libsmokeknewstuff2-3
25816 libsmokeknewstuff3-3
25817 libsmokekparts3
25818 libsmokektexteditor3
25819 libsmokekutils3
25820 libsmokenepomuk3
25821 libsmokephonon3
25822 libsmokeplasma3
25823 libsmokeqtcore4-3
25824 libsmokeqtdbus4-3
25825 libsmokeqtgui4-3
25826 libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
25827 libsmokeqtopengl4-3
25828 libsmokeqtscript4-3
25829 libsmokeqtsql4-3
25830 libsmokeqtsvg4-3
25831 libsmokeqttest4-3
25832 libsmokeqtuitools4-3
25833 libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
25834 libsmokeqtxml4-3
25835 libsmokesolid3
25836 libsmokesoprano3
25837 libtaskmanager4a
25838 libtidy-0.99-0
25839 libweather-ion4a
25840 libxklavier16
25841 libxxf86misc1
25842 okteta
25843 oxygencursors
25844 plasma-dataengines-addons
25845 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
25846 plasma-widget-lancelot
25847 plasma-widgets-addons
25848 plasma-widgets-workspace
25849 polkit-kde-1
25850 ruby1.8
25851 systemsettings
25852 update-notifier-common
25853 </p></blockquote>
25854
25855 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
25856 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
25857 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
25858 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
25859
25860 </div>
25861 <div class="tags">
25862
25863
25864 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>.
25865
25866
25867 </div>
25868 </div>
25869 <div class="padding"></div>
25870
25871 <div class="entry">
25872 <div class="title">
25873 <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>
25874 </div>
25875 <div class="date">
25876 22nd November 2010
25877 </div>
25878 <div class="body">
25879 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
25880 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
25881 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
25882 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
25883 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a
25884 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
25885 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
25886 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
25887 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
25888
25889 <p>I found
25890 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
25891 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
25892 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
25893 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
25894 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
25895 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
25896
25897 <pre>
25898 #!/bin/sh
25899
25900 # Based on
25901 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
25902
25903 set -e
25904 set -x
25905
25906 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
25907 echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
25908 exit 1
25909 else
25910 host="$1"
25911 fi
25912
25913 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
25914 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
25915 exit 1
25916 fi
25917
25918 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
25919 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
25920 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
25921 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
25922
25923 img=$host.img
25924 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
25925 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
25926
25927 parted $img mklabel msdos
25928 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
25929 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
25930 parted $img set 1 boot on
25931
25932 modprobe dm-mod
25933 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
25934 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
25935
25936 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
25937 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
25938 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
25939
25940 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
25941 losetup -d /dev/loop0
25942 </pre>
25943
25944 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
25945 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
25946
25947 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
25948 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
25949 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
25950 seem to work just fine.</p>
25951
25952 </div>
25953 <div class="tags">
25954
25955
25956 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>.
25957
25958
25959 </div>
25960 </div>
25961 <div class="padding"></div>
25962
25963 <div class="entry">
25964 <div class="title">
25965 <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>
25966 </div>
25967 <div class="date">
25968 20th November 2010
25969 </div>
25970 <div class="body">
25971 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
25972 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
25973 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
25974 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
25975
25976 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
25977 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
25978 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
25979
25980 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
25981
25982 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25983
25984 <blockquote><p>
25985 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
25986 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
25987 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
25988 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
25989 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
25990 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
25991 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
25992 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
25993 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
25994 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
25995 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
25996 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
25997 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
25998 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
25999 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
26000 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
26001 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
26002 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
26003 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
26004 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
26005 libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
26006 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
26007 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
26008 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
26009 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
26010 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
26011 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
26012 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
26013 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
26014 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
26015 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
26016 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
26017 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
26018 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
26019 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
26020 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
26021 mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
26022 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
26023 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
26024 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
26025 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
26026 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
26027 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
26028 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
26029 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
26030 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
26031 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
26032 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
26033 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
26034 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
26035 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
26036 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
26037 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
26038 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
26039 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
26040 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
26041 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
26042 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
26043 zip
26044 </p></blockquote>
26045
26046 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
26047
26048 <blockquote><p>
26049 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
26050 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
26051 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
26052 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
26053 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
26054 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
26055 guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
26056 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
26057 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
26058 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
26059 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
26060 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
26061 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
26062 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
26063 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
26064 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
26065 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
26066 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
26067 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
26068 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
26069 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
26070 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
26071 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
26072 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
26073 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
26074 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
26075 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
26076 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
26077 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
26078 </p></blockquote>
26079
26080 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
26081
26082 <blockquote><p>
26083 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
26084 </p></blockquote>
26085
26086 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
26087
26088 <blockquote><p>
26089 [nothing]
26090 </p></blockquote>
26091
26092 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
26093
26094 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
26095
26096 <blockquote><p>
26097 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
26098 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
26099 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
26100 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
26101 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
26102 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
26103 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
26104 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
26105 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
26106 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
26107 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
26108 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
26109 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
26110 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
26111 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
26112 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
26113 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
26114 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
26115 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
26116 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
26117 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
26118 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
26119 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
26120 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
26121 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
26122 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
26123 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
26124 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
26125 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
26126 ttf-sazanami-gothic
26127 </p></blockquote>
26128
26129 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
26130
26131 <blockquote><p>
26132 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
26133 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
26134 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
26135 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
26136 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
26137 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
26138 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
26139 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
26140 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
26141 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
26142 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
26143 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
26144 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
26145 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
26146 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
26147 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
26148 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
26149 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
26150 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
26151 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
26152 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
26153 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
26154 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
26155 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
26156 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
26157 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
26158 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
26159 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
26160 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
26161 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
26162 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
26163 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
26164 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
26165 </p></blockquote>
26166
26167 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
26168
26169 <blockquote><p>
26170 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
26171 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
26172 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
26173 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
26174 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
26175 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
26176 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
26177 </p></blockquote>
26178
26179 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
26180
26181 <blockquote><p>
26182 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
26183 </p></blockquote>
26184
26185 </div>
26186 <div class="tags">
26187
26188
26189 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>.
26190
26191
26192 </div>
26193 </div>
26194 <div class="padding"></div>
26195
26196 <div class="entry">
26197 <div class="title">
26198 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
26199 </div>
26200 <div class="date">
26201 20th November 2010
26202 </div>
26203 <div class="body">
26204 <p>Answering
26205 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
26206 call from the Gnash project</a> for
26207 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
26208 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
26209 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
26210 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
26211 releases out more often.</p>
26212
26213 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
26214 I have considered setting up a <a
26215 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
26216 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
26217 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
26218 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
26219 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
26220 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
26221 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
26222 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
26223 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
26224 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
26225 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
26226 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
26227
26228 </div>
26229 <div class="tags">
26230
26231
26232 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>.
26233
26234
26235 </div>
26236 </div>
26237 <div class="padding"></div>
26238
26239 <div class="entry">
26240 <div class="title">
26241 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
26242 </div>
26243 <div class="date">
26244 9th November 2010
26245 </div>
26246 <div class="body">
26247 <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
26248
26249 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
26250 3D linked in from
26251 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
26252 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
26253
26254 </div>
26255 <div class="tags">
26256
26257
26258 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>.
26259
26260
26261 </div>
26262 </div>
26263 <div class="padding"></div>
26264
26265 <div class="entry">
26266 <div class="title">
26267 <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>
26268 </div>
26269 <div class="date">
26270 7th November 2010
26271 </div>
26272 <div class="body">
26273 <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
26274 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
26275 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
26276 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
26277 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
26278 working using this DVD.</p>
26279
26280 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
26281 installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
26282 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
26283 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
26284 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
26285 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
26286 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
26287
26288 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
26289 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
26290 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
26291 Debian archive.</p>
26292
26293 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
26294 were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
26295 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
26296 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
26297 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
26298 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
26299 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
26300 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
26301 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
26302 documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
26303 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
26304 free X driver should work.</p>
26305
26306 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
26307 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
26308 DVD more useful again.</p>
26309
26310 </div>
26311 <div class="tags">
26312
26313
26314 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26315
26316
26317 </div>
26318 </div>
26319 <div class="padding"></div>
26320
26321 <div class="entry">
26322 <div class="title">
26323 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
26324 </div>
26325 <div class="date">
26326 24th October 2010
26327 </div>
26328 <div class="body">
26329 <p>Some updates.</p>
26330
26331 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
26332 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of 10
26333 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
26334 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
26335 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
26336 :)</p>
26337
26338 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
26339 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
26340 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
26341 It is called
26342 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
26343 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
26344 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
26345 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
26346 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
26347 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
26348
26349 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
26350 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
26351 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
26352 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
26353 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
26354 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
26355 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
26356 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
26357 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
26358 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
26359
26360 </div>
26361 <div class="tags">
26362
26363
26364 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>.
26365
26366
26367 </div>
26368 </div>
26369 <div class="padding"></div>
26370
26371 <div class="entry">
26372 <div class="title">
26373 <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>
26374 </div>
26375 <div class="date">
26376 19th October 2010
26377 </div>
26378 <div class="body">
26379 <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
26380 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
26381 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
26382 funding has dried up. I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
26383 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
26384 AVM2 flash files.</p>
26385
26386 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
26387 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
26388 following text:</P>
26389
26390 <p><blockquote>
26391
26392 <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
26393 only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
26394
26395 <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
26396
26397 <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
26398
26399 <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
26400 format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
26401 web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
26402 format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
26403 days. The project web page is available from
26404 http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
26405 of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
26406 the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
26407
26408 <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
26409 time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
26410 to get this to happen.</p>
26411
26412 <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
26413 <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
26414
26415 </blockquote></p>
26416
26417 <p>I hope you will support this effort too. I hope more than 10
26418 people will participate to make this happen. The more money the
26419 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
26420 :)</p>
26421
26422 </div>
26423 <div class="tags">
26424
26425
26426 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>.
26427
26428
26429 </div>
26430 </div>
26431 <div class="padding"></div>
26432
26433 <div class="entry">
26434 <div class="title">
26435 <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>
26436 </div>
26437 <div class="date">
26438 9th October 2010
26439 </div>
26440 <div class="body">
26441 <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
26442 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
26443 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
26444 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
26445 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
26446 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
26447 robots.</p>
26448
26449 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
26450 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them. There are
26451 a few less important features too.</p>
26452
26453 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
26454 but I never got around to releasing the current source. I decided
26455 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
26456 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
26457
26458 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
26459 published the source and deb. If you got a spykee robot, grab the
26460 source or binary package:</p>
26461
26462 <p><ul>
26463 <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>
26464 <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>
26465 <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>
26466 </ul></p>
26467
26468 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
26469 please let me know.</p>
26470
26471 </div>
26472 <div class="tags">
26473
26474
26475 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>.
26476
26477
26478 </div>
26479 </div>
26480 <div class="padding"></div>
26481
26482 <div class="entry">
26483 <div class="title">
26484 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
26485 </div>
26486 <div class="date">
26487 3rd October 2010
26488 </div>
26489 <div class="body">
26490 <p><ul>
26491
26492 <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
26493 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
26494
26495 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
26496 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
26497 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
26498
26499 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
26500 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
26501 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
26502 simple setup.
26503
26504 </ul></p>
26505
26506 </div>
26507 <div class="tags">
26508
26509
26510 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>.
26511
26512
26513 </div>
26514 </div>
26515 <div class="padding"></div>
26516
26517 <div class="entry">
26518 <div class="title">
26519 <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>
26520 </div>
26521 <div class="date">
26522 9th September 2010
26523 </div>
26524 <div class="body">
26525 <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
26526 camera, a Canon IXUS 130. It was instructive and very disturbing to
26527 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
26528 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
26529 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
26530 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the
26531 problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
26532 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
26533 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
26534
26535 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
26536 written:</p>
26537
26538 <blockquote>
26539 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
26540 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
26541 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
26542 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
26543 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
26544
26545 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
26546 standard.</p>
26547 </blockquote>
26548
26549 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
26550 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
26551 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
26552 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
26553
26554 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
26555 read
26556 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
26557 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
26558 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
26559 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
26560 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
26561 the issue. The solution is to support the
26562 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
26563 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
26564 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
26565
26566 </div>
26567 <div class="tags">
26568
26569
26570 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>.
26571
26572
26573 </div>
26574 </div>
26575 <div class="padding"></div>
26576
26577 <div class="entry">
26578 <div class="title">
26579 <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>
26580 </div>
26581 <div class="date">
26582 4th September 2010
26583 </div>
26584 <div class="body">
26585 <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
26586 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
26587 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
26588 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
26589 working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
26590 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
26591 installed.</p>
26592
26593 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
26594 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
26595 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
26596 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
26597 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
26598 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
26599 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
26600 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
26601 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
26602
26603 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
26604 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
26605 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
26606 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
26607 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
26608 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
26609 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
26610 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
26611 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
26612 pages they want to visit.</p>
26613
26614 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
26615 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
26616 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
26617 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
26618 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
26619 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
26620 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
26621 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
26622 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
26623 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
26624 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
26625
26626 </div>
26627 <div class="tags">
26628
26629
26630 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>.
26631
26632
26633 </div>
26634 </div>
26635 <div class="padding"></div>
26636
26637 <div class="entry">
26638 <div class="title">
26639 <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>
26640 </div>
26641 <div class="date">
26642 1st September 2010
26643 </div>
26644 <div class="body">
26645 <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
26646 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
26647 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
26648 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
26649 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
26650 allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
26651 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
26652 browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
26653 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
26654 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
26655 libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
26656 drive around.</p>
26657
26658 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
26659 controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
26660
26661 <p><pre>
26662 use Spykee;
26663 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
26664 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
26665 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
26666 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
26667 $spykee->left();
26668 sleep 2;
26669 $spykee->right();
26670 sleep 2;
26671 $spykee->forward();
26672 sleep 2;
26673 $spykee->back();
26674 sleep 2;
26675 $spykee->stop();
26676 </pre></p>
26677
26678 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
26679 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
26680 implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of
26681 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
26682 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
26683 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
26684 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
26685 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
26686 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
26687 going. :).</p>
26688
26689 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
26690 where to make it available first. I will add a link to
26691 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
26692 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
26693
26694 </div>
26695 <div class="tags">
26696
26697
26698 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>.
26699
26700
26701 </div>
26702 </div>
26703 <div class="padding"></div>
26704
26705 <div class="entry">
26706 <div class="title">
26707 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
26708 </div>
26709 <div class="date">
26710 30th August 2010
26711 </div>
26712 <div class="body">
26713 <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
26714 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
26715 post about sshfs</a>. He reported another problem with sshfs. It
26716 fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to
26717 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have
26718 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1. I just tested to see
26719 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
26720
26721 <pre>
26722 % ln foo bar
26723 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
26724 %
26725 </pre>
26726
26727 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
26728 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
26729 avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking
26730 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
26731 nevertheless. :)</p>
26732
26733 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
26734 git from
26735 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
26736
26737 </div>
26738 <div class="tags">
26739
26740
26741 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26742
26743
26744 </div>
26745 </div>
26746 <div class="padding"></div>
26747
26748 <div class="entry">
26749 <div class="title">
26750 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
26751 </div>
26752 <div class="date">
26753 26th August 2010
26754 </div>
26755 <div class="body">
26756 <p>My file system sematics program
26757 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
26758 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
26759 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I'm
26760 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
26761 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend
26762 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
26763 Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems
26764 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
26765 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
26766 script:</p>
26767
26768 <pre>
26769 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
26770 mode_t retval = 0;
26771 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
26772 if (-1 != fd) {
26773 unlink(name);
26774 struct stat statbuf;
26775 if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
26776 retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
26777 }
26778 close(fd);
26779 }
26780 return retval;
26781 }
26782
26783 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
26784 int test_umask(void) {
26785 printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
26786
26787 mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
26788 mode_t newmode;
26789 if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
26790 printf(" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
26791 newmode);
26792 }
26793 umask(007);
26794 if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
26795 printf(" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
26796 newmode);
26797 }
26798
26799 umask (orig_umask);
26800 return 0;
26801 }
26802
26803 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
26804 [...]
26805 test_umask();
26806 return 0;
26807 }
26808 </pre>
26809
26810 <p>Sure enough. On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
26811
26812 <pre>
26813 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
26814 info: testing symlink creation
26815 info: testing subdirectory creation
26816 info: testing fcntl locking
26817 Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26818 Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26819 Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
26820 Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26821 Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26822 Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
26823 info: testing umask effect on file creation
26824 </pre>
26825
26826 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
26827 result:</p>
26828
26829 <pre>
26830 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
26831 info: testing symlink creation
26832 info: testing subdirectory creation
26833 info: testing fcntl locking
26834 Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26835 Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26836 Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
26837 Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26838 Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26839 Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
26840 info: testing umask effect on file creation
26841 error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
26842 error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
26843 </pre>
26844
26845 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
26846 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
26847 directory.</p>
26848
26849 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
26850 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
26851
26852 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
26853 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
26854 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
26855
26856 </div>
26857 <div class="tags">
26858
26859
26860 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26861
26862
26863 </div>
26864 </div>
26865 <div class="padding"></div>
26866
26867 <div class="entry">
26868 <div class="title">
26869 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
26870 </div>
26871 <div class="date">
26872 15th August 2010
26873 </div>
26874 <div class="body">
26875 <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
26876 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
26877 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
26878 well. Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
26879 should go down. In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
26880 long time.</p>
26881
26882 </div>
26883 <div class="tags">
26884
26885
26886 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>.
26887
26888
26889 </div>
26890 </div>
26891 <div class="padding"></div>
26892
26893 <div class="entry">
26894 <div class="title">
26895 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
26896 </div>
26897 <div class="date">
26898 9th August 2010
26899 </div>
26900 <div class="body">
26901 <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
26902 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
26903 configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
26904 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
26905 generated configuration.</p>
26906
26907 <p>What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
26908 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
26909 without any manual configuration.</p>
26910
26911 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
26912 the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
26913 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
26914 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
26915 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
26916 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
26917 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
26918 after around 50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
26919 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
26920 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
26921 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
26922 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
26923 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop. At no point during
26924 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
26925 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
26926 fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
26927 use.</p>
26928
26929 <p>How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
26930 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
26931 working properly out of the box:</p>
26932
26933 <ul>
26934 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
26935 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
26936 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
26937 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
26938 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
26939 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
26940 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
26941 </ul>
26942
26943 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)</p>
26944
26945 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
26946 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
26947 administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
26948 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
26949 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
26950
26951 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
26952 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
26953 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
26954 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
26955 /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
26956 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
26957 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
26958 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
26959
26960 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
26961 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
26962 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
26963 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
26964 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
26965 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
26966 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
26967 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
26968 LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
26969 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
26970 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
26971 such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
26972 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
26973 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I've been unable to find a way to
26974 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
26975 current DNS domain is used.</p>
26976
26977 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
26978 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
26979 found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
26980 Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
26981 server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
26982 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
26983 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
26984 log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
26985 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
26986 network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
26987 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
26988 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
26989 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
26990
26991 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
26992 located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
26993 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
26994 attribute is used if found. If it isn't found, the home directory
26995 path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
26996 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
26997 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
26998 smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
26999 edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
27000 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
27001 do for now. :)</p>
27002
27003 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
27004 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
27005 more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
27006 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
27007 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
27008 yet.</p>
27009
27010 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
27011 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27012
27013 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
27014 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
27015 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
27016 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
27017
27018 </div>
27019 <div class="tags">
27020
27021
27022 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27023
27024
27025 </div>
27026 </div>
27027 <div class="padding"></div>
27028
27029 <div class="entry">
27030 <div class="title">
27031 <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>
27032 </div>
27033 <div class="date">
27034 8th August 2010
27035 </div>
27036 <div class="body">
27037 <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
27038 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
27039 Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
27040 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
27041 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
27042 mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
27043 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
27044
27045 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
27046 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
27047 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
27048 underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
27049 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
27050 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
27051 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
27052
27053 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
27054 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
27055 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
27056 it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
27057 help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
27058
27059 <pre>
27060 /*
27061 * Some tests to check the file system sematics. Used to verify that
27062 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
27063 * directory.
27064 * License: GPL v2 or later
27065 *
27066 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
27067 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
27068 */
27069
27070 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
27071 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
27072 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
27073
27074 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
27075
27076 #include &lt;errno.h>
27077 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
27078 #include &lt;stdio.h>
27079 #include &lt;string.h>
27080 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
27081 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
27082 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
27083 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
27084 #include &lt;unistd.h>
27085
27086 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
27087 /*
27088 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
27089 * package and linking with -lsqlite3. A more low level test is
27090 * below.
27091 * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
27092 */
27093 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
27094 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS \
27095 "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
27096 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
27097 char *zErrMsg;
27098 char *name = "testsqlite.db";
27099 sqlite3 *db=NULL;
27100 unlink(name);
27101 int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
27102 if( rc ){
27103 printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
27104 sqlite3_close(db);
27105 return -1;
27106 }
27107
27108 /* create tables */
27109 rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL, 0, &zErrMsg);
27110 if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
27111 printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
27112 sqlite3_close(db);
27113 return -1;
27114 }
27115 printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
27116 sqlite3_close(db);
27117 return 0;
27118 }
27119 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
27120
27121 /*
27122 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3. This
27123 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003. This is
27124 * done in the sqlite3 library.
27125 * See also
27126 * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
27127 * POSIX specification
27128 * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
27129 */
27130 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
27131 struct flock fl;
27132 char *name = "testsqlite.db";
27133 unlink(name);
27134 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
27135 printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
27136
27137 fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
27138 fl.l_pid = getpid();
27139 printf(" Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
27140 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
27141 fl.l_len = 1;
27142 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
27143 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27144
27145 printf(" Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
27146 fl.l_start = 1073741826;
27147 fl.l_len = 510;
27148 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
27149 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27150
27151 printf(" Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
27152 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
27153 fl.l_len = 1;
27154 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
27155 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27156
27157 printf(" Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
27158 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
27159 fl.l_len = 1;
27160 fl.l_type = F_WRLCK;
27161 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27162
27163 printf(" Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
27164 fl.l_start = 1073741826;
27165 fl.l_len = 510;
27166 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27167
27168 printf(" Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
27169 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
27170 fl.l_len = 2;
27171 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
27172 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
27173
27174 close(fd);
27175 return 0;
27176 }
27177
27178 /*
27179 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
27180 * below them. This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
27181 * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
27182 * slowing down file operations.
27183 */
27184 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
27185 #define LEVELS 5
27186 char *path = strdup("test");
27187 char *dirs[LEVELS];
27188 int level;
27189 printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
27190 for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
27191 char *newpath = NULL;
27192 if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
27193 printf(" error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
27194 path, strerror(errno));
27195 break;
27196 }
27197 asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
27198 free(path);
27199 path = newpath;
27200 }
27201 return 0;
27202 }
27203
27204 /*
27205 * Test if symlinks can be created. This was a problem detected with
27206 * KDE.
27207 */
27208 int test_symlinks(void) {
27209 printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
27210 unlink("symlink");
27211 if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
27212 printf(" error: Unable to create symlink\n");
27213 return 0;
27214 }
27215
27216 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
27217 printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
27218 test_symlinks();
27219 test_subdirectory_creation();
27220 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
27221 test_sqlite_open();
27222 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
27223 test_gcompris_locking();
27224 return 0;
27225 }
27226 </pre>
27227
27228 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
27229 this:</p>
27230
27231 <pre>
27232 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
27233 info: testing symlink creation
27234 info: testing subdirectory creation
27235 info: sqlite worked
27236 info: testing fcntl locking
27237 Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
27238 Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
27239 Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
27240 Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
27241 Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
27242 Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
27243 </pre>
27244
27245 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
27246 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
27247 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
27248 the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
27249 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
27250 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
27251 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
27252 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
27253
27254 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
27255 it. :)</p>
27256
27257 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
27258 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
27259 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
27260
27261 </div>
27262 <div class="tags">
27263
27264
27265 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27266
27267
27268 </div>
27269 </div>
27270 <div class="padding"></div>
27271
27272 <div class="entry">
27273 <div class="title">
27274 <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>
27275 </div>
27276 <div class="date">
27277 7th August 2010
27278 </div>
27279 <div class="body">
27280 <p>A few days ago, I
27281 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
27282 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
27283 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
27284 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
27285 university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
27286 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
27287 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
27288 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
27289 around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
27290
27291 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
27292 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
27293 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
27294 servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
27295 configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
27296 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
27297 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
27298 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
27299 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
27300 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
27301 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
27302 a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
27303 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
27304 gave it a IP address.</p>
27305
27306 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
27307 entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
27308 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
27309 server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
27310 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
27311 pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
27312 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
27313 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
27314
27315 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
27316 directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
27317 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
27318 the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
27319 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
27320 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
27321
27322 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
27323 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
27324 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
27325 authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
27326 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
27327 with UID and GID values.</p>
27328
27329 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
27330 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27331
27332 </div>
27333 <div class="tags">
27334
27335
27336 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27337
27338
27339 </div>
27340 </div>
27341 <div class="padding"></div>
27342
27343 <div class="entry">
27344 <div class="title">
27345 <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>
27346 </div>
27347 <div class="date">
27348 3rd August 2010
27349 </div>
27350 <div class="body">
27351 <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
27352 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
27353 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
27354 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
27355 infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
27356 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
27357 servers.</p>
27358
27359 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
27360 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
27361 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
27362 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
27363 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
27364 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
27365 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
27366 .uio.no.</p>
27367
27368 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
27369 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
27370 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
27371 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
27372 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
27373 university servers.</p>
27374
27375 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
27376 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
27377 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
27378 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
27379 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
27380 uses.</p>
27381
27382 </div>
27383 <div class="tags">
27384
27385
27386 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27387
27388
27389 </div>
27390 </div>
27391 <div class="padding"></div>
27392
27393 <div class="entry">
27394 <div class="title">
27395 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
27396 </div>
27397 <div class="date">
27398 27th July 2010
27399 </div>
27400 <div class="body">
27401 <p>I discovered this while doing
27402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
27403 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>. A few packages
27404 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
27405 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
27406 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
27407
27408 <p>An example is from todays
27409 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
27410 of KDE using aptitude</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
27411 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
27412 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
27413 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
27414 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
27415 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
27416
27417 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
27418
27419 <blockquote><pre>
27420 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
27421 perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
27422 Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
27423 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
27424 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
27425 </pre></blockquote>
27426
27427 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
27428 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
27429 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
27430 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
27431 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
27432 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
27433 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
27434 of dependency loops.</p>
27435
27436 <p>Thanks to
27437 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
27438 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
27439 dependencies
27440 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
27441 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
27442
27443 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
27444 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
27445 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
27446 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
27447 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
27448 it.</p>
27449
27450 </div>
27451 <div class="tags">
27452
27453
27454 Tags: <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>.
27455
27456
27457 </div>
27458 </div>
27459 <div class="padding"></div>
27460
27461 <div class="entry">
27462 <div class="title">
27463 <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>
27464 </div>
27465 <div class="date">
27466 27th July 2010
27467 </div>
27468 <div class="body">
27469 <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
27470 with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
27471 completed.</p>
27472
27473 <blockquote>
27474 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
27475 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
27476 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
27477 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
27478 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
27479 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
27480 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
27481 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
27482
27483 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
27484 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
27485 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
27486
27487 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
27488 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
27489 much.</p>
27490
27491 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
27492
27493 <ul>
27494 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
27495 <ul>
27496 <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
27497 combination with some new artwork
27498 <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
27499 <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
27500 <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
27501 <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
27502 <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
27503 <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
27504 <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
27505 <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
27506 <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
27507 </ul></li>
27508 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
27509 Enabled for:
27510 <ul>
27511 <li>PAM
27512 <li>LDAP
27513 <li>IMAP
27514 <li>SMTP (sender verification)
27515 </ul>
27516 </li>
27517 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
27518 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
27519 fetched from LDAP.</li>
27520 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
27521 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
27522 </ul>
27523 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
27524
27525 <ul>
27526 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
27527 scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
27528 for testing.</li>
27529 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
27530 and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
27531 clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
27532 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
27533 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
27534 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
27535 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
27536 netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
27537 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
27538 some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
27539 jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
27540 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
27541 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
27542 and help out with translations.</li>
27543 </ul>
27544
27545 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
27546
27547 <ul>
27548 <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>
27549 <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>
27550 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
27551 </ul>
27552 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
27553
27554 <ul>
27555 <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>
27556 <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>
27557 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
27558 </ul>
27559
27560 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
27561 get closer to the final release.</p>
27562
27563 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
27564
27565 <ul>
27566 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
27567 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
27568 </ul>
27569
27570 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
27571 <ul>
27572 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
27573 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
27574 </ul>
27575 <p>How to report bugs:
27576 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
27577
27578 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
27579 </blockquote>
27580
27581 </div>
27582 <div class="tags">
27583
27584
27585 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27586
27587
27588 </div>
27589 </div>
27590 <div class="padding"></div>
27591
27592 <div class="entry">
27593 <div class="title">
27594 <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>
27595 </div>
27596 <div class="date">
27597 25th July 2010
27598 </div>
27599 <div class="body">
27600 <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
27601 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
27602 Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
27603 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
27604 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
27605
27606 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
27607 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
27608 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
27609 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
27610 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
27611 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
27612 package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
27613
27614 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
27615 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
27616 password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
27617 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
27618 up. :)</p>
27619
27620 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
27621 Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
27622 also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
27623
27624 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
27625 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
27626 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
27627 the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
27628 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
27629 time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
27630 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
27631 release another day.</p>
27632
27633 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
27634 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27635
27636 </div>
27637 <div class="tags">
27638
27639
27640 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27641
27642
27643 </div>
27644 </div>
27645 <div class="padding"></div>
27646
27647 <div class="entry">
27648 <div class="title">
27649 <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>
27650 </div>
27651 <div class="date">
27652 18th July 2010
27653 </div>
27654 <div class="body">
27655 <p>Thanks to
27656 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
27657 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
27658 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
27659 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
27660 for calculating routes</a>. The support is still experimental and
27661 only available from the development server, until more experience is
27662 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
27663
27664 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
27665 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
27666 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
27667 the issue. I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
27668 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
27669 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
27670 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
27671
27672 </div>
27673 <div class="tags">
27674
27675
27676 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>.
27677
27678
27679 </div>
27680 </div>
27681 <div class="padding"></div>
27682
27683 <div class="entry">
27684 <div class="title">
27685 <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>
27686 </div>
27687 <div class="date">
27688 17th July 2010
27689 </div>
27690 <div class="body">
27691 <p>This is a
27692 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
27693 on my
27694 <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
27695 work</a> on
27696 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
27697 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
27698
27699 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
27700 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
27701 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
27702 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
27703
27704 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
27705 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
27706 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
27707
27708 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
27709
27710 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
27711 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
27712 the web.
27713
27714 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
27715 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
27716 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
27717 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
27718 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
27719 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
27720
27721 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
27722 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
27723 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
27724 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
27725 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
27726 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
27727 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
27728 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
27729 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
27730 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
27731 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
27732 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
27733 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
27734 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
27735 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
27736 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
27737
27738 <blockquote><pre>
27739 ldapsearch -h ldap \
27740 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
27741 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
27742 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
27743 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
27744 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
27745 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
27746
27747 ldapsearch -h ldap \
27748 -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
27749 -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
27750 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
27751 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
27752 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
27753 </pre></blockquote>
27754
27755 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
27756 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
27757 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
27758 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27759 also exist.</p>
27760
27761 <blockquote><pre>
27762 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27763 objectclass: top
27764 objectclass: dnsdomain
27765 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
27766 dc: tjener
27767 arecord: 10.0.2.2
27768 associateddomain: tjener.intern
27769
27770 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27771 objectclass: top
27772 objectclass: dnsdomain2
27773 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
27774 dc: 2
27775 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
27776 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
27777 </pre></blockquote>
27778
27779 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
27780 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
27781 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
27782 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
27783 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
27784 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
27785 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
27786 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
27787 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
27788 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
27789 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
27790 instead.</p>
27791
27792 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
27793 like this:</p>
27794
27795 <blockquote><pre>
27796 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
27797 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
27798 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
27799 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
27800 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
27801 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
27802
27803 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
27804 '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
27805 </pre></blockquote>
27806
27807 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
27808 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
27809 reverse lookups.</p>
27810
27811 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
27812 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
27813 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
27814 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
27815
27816 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
27817 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
27818 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
27819
27820 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
27821 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
27822 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
27823 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
27824 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
27825
27826 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
27827 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
27828 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
27829 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
27830 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
27831
27832 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
27833 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
27834 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
27835 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
27836 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
27837 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
27838
27839 <blockquote><pre>
27840 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
27841 SUP top
27842 AUXILIARY
27843 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
27844 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
27845 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
27846 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
27847 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
27848 ))
27849 </pre></blockquote>
27850
27851 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
27852 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
27853 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
27854 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
27855 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
27856 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
27857
27858 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
27859
27860 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
27861 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
27862 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
27863 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
27864 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
27865
27866 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
27867 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
27868 stored. These are the relevant entries from
27869 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
27870
27871 <blockquote><pre>
27872 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
27873 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
27874 </pre></blockquote>
27875
27876 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
27877 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
27878 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
27879 search result is this entry:</p>
27880
27881 <blockquote><pre>
27882 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27883 cn: dhcp
27884 objectClass: top
27885 objectClass: dhcpServer
27886 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27887 </pre></blockquote>
27888
27889 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
27890 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
27891 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
27892 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
27893 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
27894 The search result is this entry:</p>
27895
27896 <blockquote><pre>
27897 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27898 cn: DHCP Config
27899 objectClass: top
27900 objectClass: dhcpService
27901 objectClass: dhcpOptions
27902 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27903 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
27904 dhcpStatements: authoritative
27905 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
27906 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
27907 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
27908 </pre></blockquote>
27909
27910 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
27911 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
27912 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
27913 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
27914 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
27915 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
27916 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
27917 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
27918 related computer objects.</p>
27919
27920 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
27921 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
27922 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
27923 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
27924 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
27925 like:</p>
27926
27927 <blockquote><pre>
27928 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27929 cn: hostname
27930 objectClass: top
27931 objectClass: dhcpHost
27932 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
27933 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
27934 </pre></blockquote>
27935
27936 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
27937 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
27938 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
27939 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
27940 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
27941 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
27942 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
27943 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
27944 structural object class.
27945
27946 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
27947
27948 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
27949 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
27950 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
27951 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
27952 in the configuration.</p>
27953
27954 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
27955 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
27956 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
27957 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
27958 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
27959 structure.</p>
27960
27961 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
27962 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
27963
27964 <blockquote><pre>
27965 ou=services
27966 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
27967 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
27968 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
27969 cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
27970 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
27971 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
27972 cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
27973 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
27974 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
27975 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
27976 </pre></blockquote>
27977
27978 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
27979 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
27980 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
27981 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
27982
27983 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
27984 like this:</p>
27985
27986 <blockquote><pre>
27987 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27988 dc: hostname
27989 objectClass: top
27990 objectClass: dhcpHost
27991 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
27992 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
27993 associateddomain: hostname.intern
27994 arecord: 10.11.12.13
27995 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
27996 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
27997 </pre></blockquote>
27998
27999 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
28000 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
28001 auxiliary object class.</p>
28002
28003 </div>
28004 <div class="tags">
28005
28006
28007 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>.
28008
28009
28010 </div>
28011 </div>
28012 <div class="padding"></div>
28013
28014 <div class="entry">
28015 <div class="title">
28016 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
28017 </div>
28018 <div class="date">
28019 14th July 2010
28020 </div>
28021 <div class="body">
28022 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
28023 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
28024 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
28025 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
28026 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
28027
28028 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
28029 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
28030
28031 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
28032 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
28033 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
28034 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
28035 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
28036 to a slave DNS server.</p>
28037
28038 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
28039 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
28040 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
28041 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
28042 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
28043 seem to work.</p>
28044
28045 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
28046 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
28047 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
28048 this:</p>
28049
28050 <blockquote><pre>
28051 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
28052 cn: hostname
28053 objectClass: dhcphost
28054 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
28055 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
28056 associateddomain: hostname.intern
28057 arecord: 10.11.12.13
28058 dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
28059 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
28060 ldapconfigsound: Y
28061 </pre></blockquote>
28062
28063 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
28064 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
28065 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
28066 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
28067
28068 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
28069 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
28070 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
28071 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
28072 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
28073 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
28074 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
28075 might be a good place to put it.</p>
28076
28077 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28078 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28079
28080 </div>
28081 <div class="tags">
28082
28083
28084 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>.
28085
28086
28087 </div>
28088 </div>
28089 <div class="padding"></div>
28090
28091 <div class="entry">
28092 <div class="title">
28093 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
28094 </div>
28095 <div class="date">
28096 11th July 2010
28097 </div>
28098 <div class="body">
28099 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
28100 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
28101 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
28102 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
28103
28104 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
28105 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
28106 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
28107 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
28108 LTSP clients.</p>
28109
28110 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
28111 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
28112 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
28113
28114 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
28115 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
28116 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
28117
28118 <blockquote><pre>
28119 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
28120 #
28121 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
28122 #
28123 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
28124 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
28125 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
28126 #
28127 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
28128 # existence of attribute names.
28129 #
28130 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
28131 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
28132 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
28133 #
28134 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
28135 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
28136 #
28137 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
28138 # SUP top
28139 # AUXILIARY
28140 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
28141
28142 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
28143 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
28144 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
28145 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
28146 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
28147 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
28148 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
28149 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
28150 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
28151 # bass value on to clients
28152 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
28153 done
28154 done
28155 fi
28156 </pre></blockquote>
28157
28158 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
28159 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
28160 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
28161 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
28162 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
28163
28164 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28165 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28166
28167 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
28168 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
28169 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
28170 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>. I found its
28171 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
28172 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
28173
28174 </div>
28175 <div class="tags">
28176
28177
28178 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>.
28179
28180
28181 </div>
28182 </div>
28183 <div class="padding"></div>
28184
28185 <div class="entry">
28186 <div class="title">
28187 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
28188 </div>
28189 <div class="date">
28190 9th July 2010
28191 </div>
28192 <div class="body">
28193 <p>Since
28194 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
28195 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
28196 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
28197 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
28198 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
28199 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
28200 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
28201 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
28202 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
28203 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
28204 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
28205 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
28206 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
28207
28208 </div>
28209 <div class="tags">
28210
28211
28212 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>.
28213
28214
28215 </div>
28216 </div>
28217 <div class="padding"></div>
28218
28219 <div class="entry">
28220 <div class="title">
28221 <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>
28222 </div>
28223 <div class="date">
28224 3rd July 2010
28225 </div>
28226 <div class="body">
28227 <p>Here is a short update on my <a
28228 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
28229 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>. Here is a summary of the
28230 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
28231 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
28232 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
28233 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
28234 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
28235
28236 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
28237 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
28238 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
28239 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
28240 publish the difference.</p>
28241
28242 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
28243
28244 <blockquote><p>
28245 at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
28246 libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
28247 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
28248 libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
28249 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
28250 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
28251 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
28252 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
28253 </p></blockquote>
28254
28255 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
28256
28257 <blockquote><p>
28258 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
28259 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
28260 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
28261 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
28262 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
28263 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
28264 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
28265 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
28266 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
28267 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
28268 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
28269 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
28270 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
28271 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
28272 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
28273 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
28274 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
28275 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
28276 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
28277 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
28278 </p></blockquote>
28279
28280 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
28281
28282 <blockquote><p>
28283 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
28284 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
28285 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
28286 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
28287 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
28288 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
28289 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
28290 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
28291 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
28292 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
28293 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
28294 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
28295 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
28296 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
28297 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
28298 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
28299 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
28300 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
28301 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
28302 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
28303 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
28304 </p></blockquote>
28305
28306 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
28307
28308 <blockquote><p>
28309 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
28310 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
28311 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
28312 </p></blockquote>
28313
28314 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
28315 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
28316 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
28317 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
28318 the difference somewhat.
28319
28320 </div>
28321 <div class="tags">
28322
28323
28324 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>.
28325
28326
28327 </div>
28328 </div>
28329 <div class="padding"></div>
28330
28331 <div class="entry">
28332 <div class="title">
28333 <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>
28334 </div>
28335 <div class="date">
28336 1st July 2010
28337 </div>
28338 <div class="body">
28339 <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
28340 a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
28341 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
28342 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
28343 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
28344 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
28345 in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
28346 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
28347 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
28348
28349 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
28350
28351 This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
28352 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
28353 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
28354 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
28355 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
28356 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
28357 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
28358 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
28359 using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
28360 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
28361 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
28362 archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
28363 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
28364 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
28365 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
28366
28367 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
28368
28369 <blockquote><pre>
28370 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
28371 </pre></blockquote>
28372
28373 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
28374 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
28375 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
28376 sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I've been unable to get TLS
28377 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
28378 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
28379 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
28380 on how to get this working.</p>
28381
28382 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
28383 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
28384 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
28385 currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
28386 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
28387 instructions I found in the
28388 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
28389 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
28390
28391 <blockquote><pre>
28392 debug-level 0
28393 reload-count unlimited
28394 paranoia no
28395
28396 enable-cache passwd yes
28397 positive-time-to-live passwd 2592000
28398 negative-time-to-live passwd 20
28399 suggested-size passwd 211
28400 check-files passwd yes
28401 persistent passwd yes
28402 shared passwd yes
28403 max-db-size passwd 33554432
28404 auto-propagate passwd yes
28405
28406 enable-cache group yes
28407 positive-time-to-live group 2592000
28408 negative-time-to-live group 20
28409 suggested-size group 211
28410 check-files group yes
28411 persistent group yes
28412 shared group yes
28413 max-db-size group 33554432
28414 auto-propagate group yes
28415
28416 enable-cache hosts no
28417 positive-time-to-live hosts 2592000
28418 negative-time-to-live hosts 20
28419 suggested-size hosts 211
28420 check-files hosts yes
28421 persistent hosts yes
28422 shared hosts yes
28423 max-db-size hosts 33554432
28424
28425 enable-cache services yes
28426 positive-time-to-live services 2592000
28427 negative-time-to-live services 20
28428 suggested-size services 211
28429 check-files services yes
28430 persistent services yes
28431 shared services yes
28432 max-db-size services 33554432
28433 </pre></blockquote>
28434
28435 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
28436 automatically like the one provided in
28437 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
28438 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
28439 directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
28440 look like this:</p>
28441
28442 <blockquote><pre>
28443 passwd: files ldap
28444 group: files ldap
28445 shadow: files ldap
28446 hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
28447 networks: files
28448 protocols: files
28449 services: files
28450 ethers: files
28451 rpc: files
28452 netgroup: files ldap
28453 </pre></blockquote>
28454
28455 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
28456 shadow and netgroup.</p>
28457
28458 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
28459 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
28460 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
28461 attributes cached.
28462
28463 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
28464 libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
28465
28466 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
28467 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
28468 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
28469 LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
28470 discovered sssd.</p>
28471
28472 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
28473
28474 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
28475 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
28476 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
28477 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
28478 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
28479 machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
28480 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
28481 libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
28482 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
28483 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010. Because the
28484 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
28485 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
28486 version 1.2 is now in testing.
28487
28488 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
28489 roaming setup I want</p>
28490
28491 <blockquote><pre>
28492 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
28493 </pre></blockquote>
28494
28495 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
28496 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
28497
28498 <blockquote><pre>
28499 [sssd]
28500 config_file_version = 2
28501 reconnection_retries = 3
28502 sbus_timeout = 30
28503 services = nss, pam
28504 domains = INTERN
28505
28506 [nss]
28507 filter_groups = root
28508 filter_users = root
28509 reconnection_retries = 3
28510
28511 [pam]
28512 reconnection_retries = 3
28513
28514 [domain/INTERN]
28515 enumerate = false
28516 cache_credentials = true
28517
28518 id_provider = ldap
28519 auth_provider = ldap
28520 chpass_provider = ldap
28521
28522 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
28523 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
28524 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
28525 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
28526 </pre></blockquote>
28527
28528 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set
28529 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
28530
28531 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
28532 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
28533 modify it manually.</p>
28534
28535 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28536 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28537
28538 </div>
28539 <div class="tags">
28540
28541
28542 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28543
28544
28545 </div>
28546 </div>
28547 <div class="padding"></div>
28548
28549 <div class="entry">
28550 <div class="title">
28551 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
28552 </div>
28553 <div class="date">
28554 28th June 2010
28555 </div>
28556 <div class="body">
28557 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
28558 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
28559 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
28560 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
28561 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
28562 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
28563 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
28564 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
28565 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
28566 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
28567
28568 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
28569 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
28570 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
28571 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
28572 released.</p>
28573
28574 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
28575 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
28576 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
28577 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
28578
28579 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
28580 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28581
28582 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
28583 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
28584 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
28585 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
28586 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
28587
28588 </div>
28589 <div class="tags">
28590
28591
28592 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>.
28593
28594
28595 </div>
28596 </div>
28597 <div class="padding"></div>
28598
28599 <div class="entry">
28600 <div class="title">
28601 <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>
28602 </div>
28603 <div class="date">
28604 24th June 2010
28605 </div>
28606 <div class="body">
28607 <p>A while back, I
28608 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
28609 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
28610 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
28611 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
28612
28613 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
28614 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
28615 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
28616 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
28617
28618 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
28619 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
28620 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
28621 Debian Edu.</p>
28622
28623 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
28624 the
28625 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
28626 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
28627 available today from IETF.</p>
28628
28629 <pre>
28630 --- dhcp.schema (revision 65192)
28631 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
28632 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
28633 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
28634 NAME 'dhcpHost'
28635 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
28636 - SUP top
28637 + SUP top AUXILIARY
28638 MUST cn
28639 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
28640 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
28641 </pre>
28642
28643 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
28644 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
28645 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
28646
28647 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28648 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28649
28650 </div>
28651 <div class="tags">
28652
28653
28654 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>.
28655
28656
28657 </div>
28658 </div>
28659 <div class="padding"></div>
28660
28661 <div class="entry">
28662 <div class="title">
28663 <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>
28664 </div>
28665 <div class="date">
28666 16th June 2010
28667 </div>
28668 <div class="body">
28669 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
28670 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
28671 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
28672 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
28673 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
28674 this:
28675
28676 <blockquote><pre>
28677 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
28678 tasksel --new-install
28679 </pre></blockquote>
28680
28681 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
28682 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
28683 any output what so ever.
28684
28685 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
28686 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
28687 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
28688 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
28689 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
28690 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
28691 code like this:
28692
28693 <blockquote><pre>
28694 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
28695 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
28696 $cmd
28697 </pre></blockquote>
28698
28699 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
28700 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
28701 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
28702 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
28703 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
28704 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
28705 installation.</p>
28706
28707 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
28708 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
28709 like this.</p>
28710
28711 </div>
28712 <div class="tags">
28713
28714
28715 Tags: <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>.
28716
28717
28718 </div>
28719 </div>
28720 <div class="padding"></div>
28721
28722 <div class="entry">
28723 <div class="title">
28724 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
28725 </div>
28726 <div class="date">
28727 13th June 2010
28728 </div>
28729 <div class="body">
28730 <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
28731 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
28732 is a great service. It is to ODF documents what
28733 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
28734 pages.</p>
28735
28736 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
28737 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
28738 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
28739 interested in supporting the project. I helped him to navigate his
28740 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
28741 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
28742 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot. The machine is
28743 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
28744 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
28745 see how the project is doing.</p>
28746
28747 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
28748 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
28749 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
28750 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
28751 Windows. This is great.</p>
28752
28753 </div>
28754 <div class="tags">
28755
28756
28757 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>.
28758
28759
28760 </div>
28761 </div>
28762 <div class="padding"></div>
28763
28764 <div class="entry">
28765 <div class="title">
28766 <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>
28767 </div>
28768 <div class="date">
28769 13th June 2010
28770 </div>
28771 <div class="body">
28772 <p>My
28773 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
28774 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
28775 finally made the upgrade logs available from
28776 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
28777 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
28778 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
28779 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
28780
28781 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
28782 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
28783 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
28784 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
28785 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
28786 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
28787 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
28788 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
28789
28790 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
28791 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
28792 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
28793 too surprising.</p>
28794
28795 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
28796 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
28797 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
28798 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
28799 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
28800 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
28801 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
28802 continue.</p>
28803
28804 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
28805 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
28806 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
28807 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
28808 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
28809 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
28810 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
28811 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
28812 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
28813 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
28814 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
28815 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
28816 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
28817 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
28818 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
28819 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28820 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
28821 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
28822 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
28823 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
28824 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
28825 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
28826 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
28827 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
28828 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
28829 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
28830 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
28831 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
28832 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
28833 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
28834
28835 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
28836
28837 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
28838 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
28839 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
28840 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
28841 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
28842 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
28843 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
28844 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
28845 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
28846 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
28847 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
28848 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
28849 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
28850 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
28851 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
28852 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
28853 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
28854 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
28855 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
28856 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
28857 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
28858 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
28859 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
28860 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
28861 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
28862 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
28863 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
28864 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
28865 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
28866 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28867 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
28868 zip</p>
28869
28870 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
28871
28872 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
28873 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
28874 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
28875 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
28876 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
28877 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
28878 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
28879 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
28880 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
28881 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
28882 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
28883 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
28884 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
28885 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
28886 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28887 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
28888 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
28889 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
28890 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
28891 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
28892 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
28893 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
28894 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
28895 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
28896 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
28897 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
28898 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
28899 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
28900
28901 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
28902 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
28903 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
28904 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
28905 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
28906 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
28907 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
28908 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
28909 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
28910 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
28911 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
28912 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
28913 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
28914 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
28915 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
28916 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
28917 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
28918 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
28919 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
28920 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
28921 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
28922 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
28923 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
28924 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
28925 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
28926 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
28927 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
28928 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
28929 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
28930 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
28931 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
28932 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
28933 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
28934 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
28935 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
28936 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28937 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
28938 xulrunner-1.9</p>
28939
28940
28941 </div>
28942 <div class="tags">
28943
28944
28945 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>.
28946
28947
28948 </div>
28949 </div>
28950 <div class="padding"></div>
28951
28952 <div class="entry">
28953 <div class="title">
28954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
28955 </div>
28956 <div class="date">
28957 11th June 2010
28958 </div>
28959 <div class="body">
28960 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
28961 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
28962 have been discovered and reported in the process
28963 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
28964 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
28965 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
28966 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
28967 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
28968
28969 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
28970 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
28971 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
28972 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
28973 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
28974 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
28975
28976 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
28977 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
28978 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
28979 is created. The bug report
28980 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
28981 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
28982 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
28983 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
28984 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
28985 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
28986 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
28987 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
28988 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
28989 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
28990 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
28991 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
28992 Debian Squeeze.</p>
28993
28994 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
28995 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
28996 trick:</p>
28997
28998 <blockquote><pre>
28999 #!/bin/sh
29000 set -ex
29001
29002 if [ "$1" ] ; then
29003 desktop=$1
29004 else
29005 desktop=gnome
29006 fi
29007
29008 from=lenny
29009 to=squeeze
29010
29011 exec &lt; /dev/null
29012 unset LANG
29013 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
29014 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
29015 fuser -mv .
29016 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
29017 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
29018 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
29019 #!/bin/sh
29020 exit 101
29021 EOF
29022 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
29023 exit_cleanup() {
29024 umount $tmpdir/proc
29025 }
29026 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
29027 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
29028 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
29029
29030 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
29031
29032 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
29033 # to return the correct answers.
29034 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
29035 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
29036
29037 # Include the desktop and laptop task
29038 for test in desktop laptop ; do
29039 echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
29040 #!/bin/sh
29041 exit 2
29042 EOF
29043 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
29044 done
29045
29046 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
29047 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
29048 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
29049 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
29050
29051 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
29052 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
29053 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
29054 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
29055 fuser -mv
29056 </pre></blockquote>
29057
29058 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
29059 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
29060 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
29061 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
29062 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
29063 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
29064
29065 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
29066 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
29067 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
29068 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
29069 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
29070 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
29071 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
29072
29073 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
29074 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
29075 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
29076 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
29077 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
29078 packages.</p>
29079
29080 </div>
29081 <div class="tags">
29082
29083
29084 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>.
29085
29086
29087 </div>
29088 </div>
29089 <div class="padding"></div>
29090
29091 <div class="entry">
29092 <div class="title">
29093 <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>
29094 </div>
29095 <div class="date">
29096 6th June 2010
29097 </div>
29098 <div class="body">
29099 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
29100 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
29101 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
29102 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
29103 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
29104 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
29105 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
29106
29107 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
29108 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
29109 COLUMNS):</p>
29110
29111 <blockquote><pre>
29112 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
29113 previous=N
29114 PREVLEVEL=
29115 RUNLEVEL=
29116 runlevel=S
29117 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
29118 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
29119 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
29120 </pre></blockquote>
29121
29122 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
29123 script.</p>
29124
29125 <blockquote><pre>
29126 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
29127 previous=N
29128 PREVLEVEL=N
29129 RUNLEVEL=S
29130 runlevel=S
29131 </pre></blockquote>
29132
29133 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
29134 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
29135 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
29136
29137 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
29138 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
29139 choice.</p>
29140
29141 </div>
29142 <div class="tags">
29143
29144
29145 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>.
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/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
29155 </div>
29156 <div class="date">
29157 6th June 2010
29158 </div>
29159 <div class="body">
29160 <p>Via the
29161 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
29162 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
29163 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
29164 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
29165 following the standards wars of today.</p>
29166
29167 </div>
29168 <div class="tags">
29169
29170
29171 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>.
29172
29173
29174 </div>
29175 </div>
29176 <div class="padding"></div>
29177
29178 <div class="entry">
29179 <div class="title">
29180 <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>
29181 </div>
29182 <div class="date">
29183 3rd June 2010
29184 </div>
29185 <div class="body">
29186 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
29187 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
29188 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
29189 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
29190 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
29191
29192 <blockquote><pre>
29193 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
29194 vendor count
29195 Dell Computer Corporation 1
29196 PowerEdge 1750 1
29197 IBM 1
29198 eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]- 1
29199 Intel 2
29200 [no-dmi-info] 3
29201 maintainer:~#
29202 </pre></blockquote>
29203
29204 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
29205 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
29206 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
29207 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
29208 option to list the individual machines.</p>
29209
29210 <p>A larger list is
29211 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
29212 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
29213 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
29214 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
29215 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
29216 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
29217 collector.</p>
29218
29219 </div>
29220 <div class="tags">
29221
29222
29223 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>.
29224
29225
29226 </div>
29227 </div>
29228 <div class="padding"></div>
29229
29230 <div class="entry">
29231 <div class="title">
29232 <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>
29233 </div>
29234 <div class="date">
29235 1st June 2010
29236 </div>
29237 <div class="body">
29238 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
29239 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
29240 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
29241 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
29242 wait.</p>
29243
29244 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
29245 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
29246 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
29247 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
29248 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
29249 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
29250
29251 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
29252 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
29253 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
29254 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
29255 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
29256 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
29257 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
29258 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
29259
29260 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
29261
29262 </div>
29263 <div class="tags">
29264
29265
29266 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>.
29267
29268
29269 </div>
29270 </div>
29271 <div class="padding"></div>
29272
29273 <div class="entry">
29274 <div class="title">
29275 <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>
29276 </div>
29277 <div class="date">
29278 27th May 2010
29279 </div>
29280 <div class="body">
29281 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
29282 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
29283 issues are known and should be solved:
29284
29285 <p><ul>
29286
29287 <li>The wicd package seen to
29288 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
29289 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
29290 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
29291 seem to be on the case.</li>
29292
29293 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
29294 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
29295 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
29296 maintainer is on the case.</li>
29297
29298 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
29299 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
29300 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
29301 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
29302 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
29303 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
29304 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
29305 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
29306
29307 </ul></p>
29308
29309 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
29310 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
29311 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
29312 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
29313
29314 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
29315 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
29316 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
29317 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
29318
29319 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
29320
29321 </div>
29322 <div class="tags">
29323
29324
29325 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>.
29326
29327
29328 </div>
29329 </div>
29330 <div class="padding"></div>
29331
29332 <div class="entry">
29333 <div class="title">
29334 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
29335 </div>
29336 <div class="date">
29337 22nd May 2010
29338 </div>
29339 <div class="body">
29340 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
29341 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
29342 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
29343 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
29344
29345 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
29346 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
29347 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
29348 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
29349 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
29350 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
29351 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
29352 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
29353 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
29354 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
29355 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
29356 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
29357 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
29358 going to work.</p>
29359
29360 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
29361 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
29362 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
29363 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
29364 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
29365 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
29366 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
29367 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
29368 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
29369 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
29370 Edu.</p>
29371
29372 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
29373 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
29374 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
29375 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
29376 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
29377 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
29378
29379 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
29380 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
29381
29382 </div>
29383 <div class="tags">
29384
29385
29386 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>.
29387
29388
29389 </div>
29390 </div>
29391 <div class="padding"></div>
29392
29393 <div class="entry">
29394 <div class="title">
29395 <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>
29396 </div>
29397 <div class="date">
29398 19th May 2010
29399 </div>
29400 <div class="body">
29401 <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
29402 Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
29403 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
29404 package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
29405 into unstable. The
29406 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
29407 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
29408 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
29409 passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
29410 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
29411 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
29412 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
29413
29414 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
29415 roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
29416 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
29417 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
29418 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
29419 #485282</a> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
29420 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
29421 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
29422
29423 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
29424 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
29425 problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
29426 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
29427 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
29428 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
29429 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
29430
29431 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
29432 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
29433 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
29434 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
29435 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
29436 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
29437 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
29438 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
29439 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
29440 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
29441 on the home directory servers.</p>
29442
29443 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
29444 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
29445 is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
29446 message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
29447 a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
29448 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
29449
29450 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
29451 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29452
29453 </div>
29454 <div class="tags">
29455
29456
29457 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29458
29459
29460 </div>
29461 </div>
29462 <div class="padding"></div>
29463
29464 <div class="entry">
29465 <div class="title">
29466 <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>
29467 </div>
29468 <div class="date">
29469 14th May 2010
29470 </div>
29471 <div class="body">
29472 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
29473 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
29474 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
29475 expected, if I am to believe the
29476 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
29477 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
29478 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
29479 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
29480 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
29481 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
29482 version.</p>
29483
29484 More information about
29485 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
29486 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
29487 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
29488 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
29489
29490 <blockquote><pre>
29491 CONCURRENCY=none
29492 </pre></blockquote>
29493
29494 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
29495 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
29496 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
29497 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
29498
29499 </div>
29500 <div class="tags">
29501
29502
29503 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>.
29504
29505
29506 </div>
29507 </div>
29508 <div class="padding"></div>
29509
29510 <div class="entry">
29511 <div class="title">
29512 <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>
29513 </div>
29514 <div class="date">
29515 14th May 2010
29516 </div>
29517 <div class="body">
29518 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
29519 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
29520 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
29521 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
29522 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
29523 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
29524 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
29525 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
29526
29527 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
29528 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
29529 this on the collector host:</p>
29530
29531 <blockquote><pre>
29532 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
29533 </pre></blockquote>
29534
29535 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
29536 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
29537
29538 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
29539 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
29540 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
29541 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
29542 written yet.</p>
29543
29544 </div>
29545 <div class="tags">
29546
29547
29548 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>.
29549
29550
29551 </div>
29552 </div>
29553 <div class="padding"></div>
29554
29555 <div class="entry">
29556 <div class="title">
29557 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
29558 </div>
29559 <div class="date">
29560 13th May 2010
29561 </div>
29562 <div class="body">
29563 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
29564 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
29565 has been
29566 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
29567
29568 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
29569 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
29570 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
29571 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
29572 based boot system. Tollef is
29573 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
29574 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
29575 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
29576 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
29577 at the moment do not.</p>
29578
29579 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
29580 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
29581 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
29582 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
29583 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
29584 way forward.</p>
29585
29586 <p>In the mean time, based on the
29587 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
29588 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
29589 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
29590 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
29591 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
29592 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
29593 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
29594 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
29595
29596 </div>
29597 <div class="tags">
29598
29599
29600 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>.
29601
29602
29603 </div>
29604 </div>
29605 <div class="padding"></div>
29606
29607 <div class="entry">
29608 <div class="title">
29609 <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>
29610 </div>
29611 <div class="date">
29612 6th May 2010
29613 </div>
29614 <div class="body">
29615 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
29616 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
29617 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
29618 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
29619 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
29620 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
29621 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
29622
29623 <blockquote><pre>
29624 CONCURRENCY=makefile
29625 </pre></blockquote>
29626
29627 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
29628 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
29629 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
29630 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
29631 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
29632 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
29633 make this happen.</p>
29634
29635 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
29636 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
29637 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
29638 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
29639 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
29640
29641 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
29642 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
29643 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
29644 fix the remaining issues.</p>
29645
29646 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
29647 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
29648 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
29649 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
29650
29651 </div>
29652 <div class="tags">
29653
29654
29655 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>.
29656
29657
29658 </div>
29659 </div>
29660 <div class="padding"></div>
29661
29662 <div class="entry">
29663 <div class="title">
29664 <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>
29665 </div>
29666 <div class="date">
29667 2nd May 2010
29668 </div>
29669 <div class="body">
29670 <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
29671 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
29672 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
29673
29674 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
29675 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
29676 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
29677 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
29678 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
29679
29680 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
29681 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
29682
29683 <blockquote><pre>
29684 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
29685 Last password change : May 02, 2010
29686 Password expires : never
29687 Password inactive : never
29688 Account expires : never
29689 Minimum number of days between password change : 0
29690 Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
29691 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
29692 root@tjener:~#
29693 </pre></blockquote>
29694
29695 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
29696 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
29697 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
29698 to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
29699 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
29700 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
29701
29702 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
29703 intended:</p>
29704
29705 <blockquote><pre>
29706 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
29707 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
29708 Last password change : Jan 02, 1970
29709 Password expires : never
29710 Password inactive : never
29711 Account expires : never
29712 Minimum number of days between password change : 0
29713 Maximum number of days between password change : 10950
29714 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
29715 root@tjener:~#
29716 </pre></blockquote>
29717
29718 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
29719 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
29720 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
29721
29722 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
29723 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
29724
29725 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
29726 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29727
29728 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
29729 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
29730 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
29731 on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
29732 I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
29733 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there. I have not
29734 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
29735
29736 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
29737 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
29738 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
29739 change.</p>
29740
29741 </div>
29742 <div class="tags">
29743
29744
29745 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29746
29747
29748 </div>
29749 </div>
29750 <div class="padding"></div>
29751
29752 <div class="entry">
29753 <div class="title">
29754 <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>
29755 </div>
29756 <div class="date">
29757 28th April 2010
29758 </div>
29759 <div class="body">
29760 <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
29761 Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
29762 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
29763 and go.</p>
29764
29765 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
29766 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
29767 example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
29768 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
29769
29770 <ul>
29771
29772 <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
29773 the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
29774 the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
29775 server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
29776 central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
29777 request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
29778 automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
29779 and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
29780 hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
29781 request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
29782 can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
29783 the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
29784
29785 <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
29786 authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
29787 to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
29788 to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
29789 <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
29790 or the Fedora developed
29791 <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
29792 Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
29793
29794 <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
29795 using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
29796 directory, using unison.</li>
29797
29798 <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
29799 their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
29800 the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
29801 system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
29802 implemented.</li>
29803
29804 <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
29805 sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
29806
29807 <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
29808 cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
29809 local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
29810
29811 </ul>
29812
29813 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
29814 the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
29815 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
29816 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
29817 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
29818 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
29819 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
29820 when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
29821 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
29822
29823 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
29824 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29825
29826 </div>
29827 <div class="tags">
29828
29829
29830 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29831
29832
29833 </div>
29834 </div>
29835 <div class="padding"></div>
29836
29837 <div class="entry">
29838 <div class="title">
29839 <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>
29840 </div>
29841 <div class="date">
29842 19th April 2010
29843 </div>
29844 <div class="body">
29845 <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
29846 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
29847 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
29848 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
29849 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
29850 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
29851 restrictions on the web, for example from
29852 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
29853 epub-version from
29854 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
29855 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
29856 strongly recommend this book.</p>
29857
29858 </div>
29859 <div class="tags">
29860
29861
29862 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>.
29863
29864
29865 </div>
29866 </div>
29867 <div class="padding"></div>
29868
29869 <div class="entry">
29870 <div class="title">
29871 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
29872 </div>
29873 <div class="date">
29874 14th April 2010
29875 </div>
29876 <div class="body">
29877 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
29878 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
29879 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
29880 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
29881 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
29882 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
29883 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
29884 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
29885 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
29886
29887 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
29888 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
29889 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
29890 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
29891 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
29892
29893 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
29894 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?</p>
29895
29896 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
29897 Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
29898 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
29899 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
29900 to work properly.</p>
29901
29902 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
29903 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
29904 configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
29905 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
29906 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
29907 time.</p>
29908
29909 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
29910 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
29911 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
29912 up in a few days.</p>
29913
29914 </div>
29915 <div class="tags">
29916
29917
29918 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29919
29920
29921 </div>
29922 </div>
29923 <div class="padding"></div>
29924
29925 <div class="entry">
29926 <div class="title">
29927 <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>
29928 </div>
29929 <div class="date">
29930 6th March 2010
29931 </div>
29932 <div class="body">
29933 <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
29934 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
29935 when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
29936 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
29937 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
29938 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
29939
29940 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
29941 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
29942 been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
29943 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
29944
29945 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
29946 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
29947 after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
29948 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
29949 framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
29950 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
29951
29952 </div>
29953 <div class="tags">
29954
29955
29956 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29957
29958
29959 </div>
29960 </div>
29961 <div class="padding"></div>
29962
29963 <div class="entry">
29964 <div class="title">
29965 <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>
29966 </div>
29967 <div class="date">
29968 11th February 2010
29969 </div>
29970 <div class="body">
29971 <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
29972 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
29973 shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
29974 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
29975 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
29976 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
29977 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
29978
29979 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
29980
29981 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
29982 next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
29983 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
29984 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
29985
29986 </div>
29987 <div class="tags">
29988
29989
29990 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29991
29992
29993 </div>
29994 </div>
29995 <div class="padding"></div>
29996
29997 <div class="entry">
29998 <div class="title">
29999 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
30000 </div>
30001 <div class="date">
30002 27th January 2010
30003 </div>
30004 <div class="body">
30005 <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
30006 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
30007 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
30008 Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
30009 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
30010 further.</p>
30011
30012 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
30013 configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
30014 configured to be a server for the
30015 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
30016 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
30017 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
30018 work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
30019 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
30020 computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
30021 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
30022 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
30023 packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
30024 and Nagios configuration.</p>
30025
30026 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
30027 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
30028 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
30029 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
30030
30031 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
30032 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
30033 services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
30034 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
30035 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
30036 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
30037 the machine.</p>
30038
30039 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
30040 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
30041 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
30042 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
30043
30044 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
30045 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
30046 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
30047 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
30048 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
30049 everything is taken care of.</p>
30050
30051 </div>
30052 <div class="tags">
30053
30054
30055 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
30056
30057
30058 </div>
30059 </div>
30060 <div class="padding"></div>
30061
30062 <div class="entry">
30063 <div class="title">
30064 <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>
30065 </div>
30066 <div class="date">
30067 12th August 2009
30068 </div>
30069 <div class="body">
30070 <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
30071 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
30072 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage. I searched using
30073 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
30074
30075 <table>
30076 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
30077 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
30078 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
30079 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500 </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
30080 </table>
30081
30082 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
30083 got these numbers:</p>
30084
30085 <table>
30086 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
30087 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
30088 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299 </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
30089 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187 </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
30090 </table>
30091
30092 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
30093
30094 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
30095 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
30096 they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same
30097 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
30098 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
30099
30100
30101 <table>
30102 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
30103 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
30104 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
30105 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500 </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
30106 </table>
30107
30108 <p>And with 'site:no':
30109
30110 <table>
30111 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
30112 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
30113 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
30114 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186 </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
30115 </table>
30116
30117 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
30118 numbers.</p>
30119
30120 </div>
30121 <div class="tags">
30122
30123
30124 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>.
30125
30126
30127 </div>
30128 </div>
30129 <div class="padding"></div>
30130
30131 <div class="entry">
30132 <div class="title">
30133 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
30134 </div>
30135 <div class="date">
30136 8th August 2009
30137 </div>
30138 <div class="body">
30139 <p>According to <a
30140 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
30141 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
30142 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages. His interesting point is that the
30143 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
30144 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
30145 can be fixed in ISO. Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
30146 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
30147 close to solving the problems. I was part of the Norwegian committee
30148 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
30149 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
30150
30151 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
30152 with the future ahead of it. We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
30153 seminar this autumn.</p>
30154
30155 </div>
30156 <div class="tags">
30157
30158
30159 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>.
30160
30161
30162 </div>
30163 </div>
30164 <div class="padding"></div>
30165
30166 <div class="entry">
30167 <div class="title">
30168 <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>
30169 </div>
30170 <div class="date">
30171 27th July 2009
30172 </div>
30173 <div class="body">
30174 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
30175 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
30176 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
30177 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
30178 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
30179 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
30180 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
30181
30182 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
30183 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
30184 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
30185
30186 </div>
30187 <div class="tags">
30188
30189
30190 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>.
30191
30192
30193 </div>
30194 </div>
30195 <div class="padding"></div>
30196
30197 <div class="entry">
30198 <div class="title">
30199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
30200 </div>
30201 <div class="date">
30202 22nd July 2009
30203 </div>
30204 <div class="body">
30205 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
30206 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
30207 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
30208 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
30209 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
30210 the package up to date.</p>
30211
30212 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
30213 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About 10 days ago, I made
30214 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
30215 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
30216 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
30217 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
30218 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
30219 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
30220 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
30221 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
30222 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
30223 working on the future release.</p>
30224
30225 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
30226 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
30227
30228 </div>
30229 <div class="tags">
30230
30231
30232 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>.
30233
30234
30235 </div>
30236 </div>
30237 <div class="padding"></div>
30238
30239 <div class="entry">
30240 <div class="title">
30241 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
30242 </div>
30243 <div class="date">
30244 24th June 2009
30245 </div>
30246 <div class="body">
30247 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
30248 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
30249 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
30250 funded
30251 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
30252 gathering</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
30253 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
30254 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
30255 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
30256 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.</p>
30257
30258 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
30259 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
30260 boot:</p>
30261
30262 <ul>
30263
30264 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
30265
30266 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
30267 clock is in UTC.</li>
30268
30269 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
30270 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
30271 based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
30272
30273 </ul>
30274
30275 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
30276 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
30277 Villegas</a>.
30278
30279 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
30280 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
30281 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
30282 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
30283 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
30284 using this.</p>
30285
30286 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
30287 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
30288 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
30289 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
30290 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
30291 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
30292 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
30293
30294 </div>
30295 <div class="tags">
30296
30297
30298 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>.
30299
30300
30301 </div>
30302 </div>
30303 <div class="padding"></div>
30304
30305 <div class="entry">
30306 <div class="title">
30307 <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>
30308 </div>
30309 <div class="date">
30310 2nd May 2009
30311 </div>
30312 <div class="body">
30313 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
30314 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
30315 do not yet know them.</p>
30316
30317 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
30318 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
30319 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
30320 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
30321 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
30322 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
30323 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
30324 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
30325 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
30326 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
30327 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
30328
30329 <p>The second one is
30330 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
30331 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
30332 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
30333 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
30334 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
30335 and the company behind it is running
30336 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
30337 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
30338 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
30339 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
30340 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
30341 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
30342 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
30343 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
30344
30345 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
30346 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
30347 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
30348 surrounded by today.</p>
30349
30350 </div>
30351 <div class="tags">
30352
30353
30354 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
30355
30356
30357 </div>
30358 </div>
30359 <div class="padding"></div>
30360
30361 <div class="entry">
30362 <div class="title">
30363 <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>
30364 </div>
30365 <div class="date">
30366 28th April 2009
30367 </div>
30368 <div class="body">
30369 <p>Julien Blache
30370 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
30371 patch is better than a useless patch</a>. I completely disagree, as a
30372 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
30373 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
30374 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
30375 properties.</p>
30376
30377 </div>
30378 <div class="tags">
30379
30380
30381 Tags: <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>.
30382
30383
30384 </div>
30385 </div>
30386 <div class="padding"></div>
30387
30388 <div class="entry">
30389 <div class="title">
30390 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
30391 </div>
30392 <div class="date">
30393 5th April 2009
30394 </div>
30395 <div class="body">
30396 <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
30397 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net. The
30398 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
30399 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
30400 vlc. I finally found a way to do it today. I spent an hour or so
30401 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation. The
30402 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
30403 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
30404
30405 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
30406 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
30407 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
30408 --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
30409 --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
30410
30411 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
30412 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
30413 dummy interface. The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
30414 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
30415
30416 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
30417 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
30418 the vlc process with SIGTERM. Here is a complete script
30419 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
30420
30421 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
30422 set -e
30423 URL="$1"
30424 SAVEFILE="$2"
30425 DURATION="$3"
30426 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
30427 --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
30428 --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
30429 pid=$!
30430 sleep $DURATION
30431 kill $pid
30432 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
30433
30434 </div>
30435 <div class="tags">
30436
30437
30438 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>.
30439
30440
30441 </div>
30442 </div>
30443 <div class="padding"></div>
30444
30445 <div class="entry">
30446 <div class="title">
30447 <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>
30448 </div>
30449 <div class="date">
30450 30th March 2009
30451 </div>
30452 <div class="body">
30453 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
30454 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
30455 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
30456 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
30457 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
30458 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
30459 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
30460 application.</p>
30461
30462 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
30463 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
30464 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
30465 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
30466 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
30467 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
30468 blocked from doing so.</p>
30469
30470 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
30471 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
30472 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
30473 requirements change.</p>
30474
30475 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
30476 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
30477 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
30478
30479 </div>
30480 <div class="tags">
30481
30482
30483 Tags: <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>.
30484
30485
30486 </div>
30487 </div>
30488 <div class="padding"></div>
30489
30490 <div class="entry">
30491 <div class="title">
30492 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
30493 </div>
30494 <div class="date">
30495 29th March 2009
30496 </div>
30497 <div class="body">
30498 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
30499 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
30500 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
30501 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
30502 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
30503 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
30504 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
30505 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
30506 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
30507 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
30508 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
30509 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
30510 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
30511 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
30512 now. :)</p>
30513
30514 </div>
30515 <div class="tags">
30516
30517
30518 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>.
30519
30520
30521 </div>
30522 </div>
30523 <div class="padding"></div>
30524
30525 <div class="entry">
30526 <div class="title">
30527 <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>
30528 </div>
30529 <div class="date">
30530 29th March 2009
30531 </div>
30532 <div class="body">
30533 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
30534 optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
30535 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
30536 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
30537 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
30538 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
30539
30540 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
30541 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
30542 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
30543 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
30544 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
30545 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
30546 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
30547 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
30548 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
30549 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
30550 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
30551 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
30552 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
30553
30554 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
30555 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
30556 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
30557 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
30558
30559 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
30560 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
30561
30562 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
30563 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
30564 new IETF work group?</p>
30565
30566 </div>
30567 <div class="tags">
30568
30569
30570 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>.
30571
30572
30573 </div>
30574 </div>
30575 <div class="padding"></div>
30576
30577 <div class="entry">
30578 <div class="title">
30579 <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>
30580 </div>
30581 <div class="date">
30582 28th February 2009
30583 </div>
30584 <div class="body">
30585 <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
30586 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
30587 contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service)
30588 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
30589 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
30590 each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract
30591 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
30592 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
30593 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
30594 machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import
30595 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
30596 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
30597 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
30598 for the relevant machines. This make the support status information
30599 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
30600 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
30601 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
30602 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
30603 them. 27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
30604 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
30605 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
30606 services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
30607 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
30608 them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
30609 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
30610 machine.</p>
30611
30612 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
30613 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
30614 Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
30615 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
30616 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML
30617 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
30618 introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:</p>
30619
30620 <pre>
30621 use LWP::Simple;
30622 use POSIX;
30623 use WWW::Mechanize;
30624 use Date::Parse;
30625 [...]
30626 sub get_support_info {
30627 my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
30628 my $str;
30629
30630 if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
30631 # fetch website from Dell support
30632 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";
30633 my $webpage = get($url);
30634 return undef unless ($webpage);
30635
30636 my $daysleft = -1;
30637 my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
30638 foreach my $line (@lines) {
30639 next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
30640 $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
30641 $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
30642
30643 my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
30644 @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
30645 my $lastend = "";
30646 while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
30647 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
30648
30649 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
30650 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
30651 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
30652 localtime(str2time($endstr)));
30653 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
30654 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
30655 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
30656 }
30657 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
30658 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
30659 if ($lastend lt $today);
30660 }
30661 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
30662 my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
30663 my $url =
30664 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
30665 $mech->get($url);
30666 my $fields = {
30667 'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
30668 'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
30669 'country' => 'NO',
30670 'productNumber' => $productnumber,
30671 'serialNumber1' => $serial,
30672 };
30673 $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
30674 fields => $fields );
30675 # Next step is screen scraping
30676 my $content = $mech->content();
30677
30678 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
30679 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
30680 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
30681 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
30682
30683 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
30684
30685 while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
30686 my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
30687 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
30688 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
30689 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
30690 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
30691 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
30692 localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
30693
30694 $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
30695
30696 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
30697 if ($end lt $today);
30698 }
30699 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
30700 # This code ignore extended support contracts.
30701 my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
30702 if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
30703 my $content =
30704 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
30705 if ($content) {
30706 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
30707 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
30708 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
30709 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
30710
30711 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
30712 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
30713
30714 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
30715
30716 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
30717 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
30718 if ($end lt $today);
30719 }
30720 }
30721 }
30722 return $str;
30723 }
30724 </pre>
30725
30726 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
30727 serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched
30728 from dmidecode.</p>
30729
30730 <pre>
30731 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
30732 "447707-B21");
30733 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
30734 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
30735 "1234567");
30736 </pre>
30737
30738 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
30739 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
30740
30741 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
30742 contracts, so it is useless in that case. The original Dell code do
30743 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
30744 do so.</p>
30745
30746 </div>
30747 <div class="tags">
30748
30749
30750 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>.
30751
30752
30753 </div>
30754 </div>
30755 <div class="padding"></div>
30756
30757 <div class="entry">
30758 <div class="title">
30759 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
30760 </div>
30761 <div class="date">
30762 20th February 2009
30763 </div>
30764 <div class="body">
30765 <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
30766 in our computing center. This give us a challenge in tracking the
30767 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
30768 removed. Some times the location register is not updated when a
30769 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
30770 the "missing" computer.</p>
30771
30772 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
30773 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
30774 code blocks as defined in the
30775 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
30776 Standard</a>. This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
30777 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
30778 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture. The bar code standard
30779 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag. There is another project
30780 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
30781 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
30782 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
30783 codes.</p>
30784
30785 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
30786 machines in our computing center. If both racks and computers are
30787 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
30788 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
30789 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
30790 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
30791
30792 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
30793 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names. Next, I
30794 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
30795 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read. This worked
30796 fairly well. If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
30797 side, all tags in the image could be read. Because of limited space
30798 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
30799 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
30800 about half the rack. I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
30801 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
30802
30803 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
30804 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
30805 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
30806
30807 </div>
30808 <div class="tags">
30809
30810
30811 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>.
30812
30813
30814 </div>
30815 </div>
30816 <div class="padding"></div>
30817
30818 <div class="entry">
30819 <div class="title">
30820 <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>
30821 </div>
30822 <div class="date">
30823 17th January 2009
30824 </div>
30825 <div class="body">
30826 <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
30827 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
30828 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a
30829 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
30830 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this
30831 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
30832 browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several
30833 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
30834 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
30835 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
30836 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
30837 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
30838 the &lt;applet&gt; tag. All of these take a lot of options, and
30839 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
30840
30841 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
30842 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
30843 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
30844 I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture
30845 from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
30846 definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next,
30847 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
30848 of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait
30849 for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download
30850 is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the
30851 download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I
30852 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
30853 to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding
30854 autoplay="true" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
30855 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
30856 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
30857 playing when the download is done.</p>
30858
30859 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
30860 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
30861 from the nuug site</a>. Will have to test it with the new Firefox
30862 too.</p>
30863
30864 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable
30865 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
30866 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I
30867 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
30868
30869 </div>
30870 <div class="tags">
30871
30872
30873 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>.
30874
30875
30876 </div>
30877 </div>
30878 <div class="padding"></div>
30879
30880 <div class="entry">
30881 <div class="title">
30882 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
30883 </div>
30884 <div class="date">
30885 28th December 2008
30886 </div>
30887 <div class="body">
30888 <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
30889 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
30890 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
30891 directly with the video stream. For this, we use the
30892 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
30893 the Debian video team. As this require quite one computer per video
30894 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
30895 borrow laptops. And to avoid having to install extra software on
30896 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
30897 bootable USB stick. The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
30898 source, sink and mixer applications and
30899 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>. To allow this setup to
30900 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
30901 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
30902 together. And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
30903 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
30904 with USB sources. We have not yet tested this setup in a production
30905 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
30906 video mixer in a very short time frame. We will need it for
30907 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
30908
30909 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
30910 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
30911 larger stick as well.</p>
30912
30913 </div>
30914 <div class="tags">
30915
30916
30917 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>.
30918
30919
30920 </div>
30921 </div>
30922 <div class="padding"></div>
30923
30924 <div class="entry">
30925 <div class="title">
30926 <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>
30927 </div>
30928 <div class="date">
30929 7th December 2008
30930 </div>
30931 <div class="body">
30932 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
30933 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
30934 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
30935 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
30936 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
30937 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
30938 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
30939 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
30940
30941 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
30942 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
30943 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
30944 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
30945 of these cards.</p>
30946
30947 </div>
30948 <div class="tags">
30949
30950
30951 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>.
30952
30953
30954 </div>
30955 </div>
30956 <div class="padding"></div>
30957
30958 <div class="entry">
30959 <div class="title">
30960 <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>
30961 </div>
30962 <div class="date">
30963 25th November 2008
30964 </div>
30965 <div class="body">
30966 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
30967 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
30968 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
30969 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
30970 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
30971 notes are available on
30972 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
30973 Debian wiki</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
30974 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
30975 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
30976 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
30977 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
30978 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
30979 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
30980 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
30981
30982 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
30983 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
30984
30985 </div>
30986 <div class="tags">
30987
30988
30989 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>.
30990
30991
30992 </div>
30993 </div>
30994 <div class="padding"></div>
30995
30996 <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>
30997 <div id="sidebar">
30998
30999
31000
31001 <h2>Archive</h2>
31002 <ul>
31003
31004 <li>2018
31005 <ul>
31006
31007 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
31008
31009 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
31010
31011 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
31012
31013 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
31014
31015 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
31016
31017 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
31018
31019 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (2)</a></li>
31020
31021 </ul></li>
31022
31023 <li>2017
31024 <ul>
31025
31026 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
31027
31028 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
31029
31030 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
31031
31032 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
31033
31034 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
31035
31036 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
31037
31038 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
31039
31040 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
31041
31042 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
31043
31044 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
31045
31046 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
31047
31048 </ul></li>
31049
31050 <li>2016
31051 <ul>
31052
31053 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
31054
31055 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
31056
31057 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
31058
31059 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
31060
31061 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
31062
31063 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
31064
31065 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
31066
31067 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
31068
31069 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
31070
31071 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
31072
31073 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
31074
31075 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
31076
31077 </ul></li>
31078
31079 <li>2015
31080 <ul>
31081
31082 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
31083
31084 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
31085
31086 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
31087
31088 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
31089
31090 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
31091
31092 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
31093
31094 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
31095
31096 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
31097
31098 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
31099
31100 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
31101
31102 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
31103
31104 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
31105
31106 </ul></li>
31107
31108 <li>2014
31109 <ul>
31110
31111 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
31112
31113 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
31114
31115 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
31116
31117 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
31118
31119 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
31120
31121 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
31122
31123 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
31124
31125 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
31126
31127 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
31128
31129 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
31130
31131 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
31132
31133 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
31134
31135 </ul></li>
31136
31137 <li>2013
31138 <ul>
31139
31140 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
31141
31142 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
31143
31144 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
31145
31146 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
31147
31148 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
31149
31150 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
31151
31152 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
31153
31154 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
31155
31156 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
31157
31158 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
31159
31160 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
31161
31162 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
31163
31164 </ul></li>
31165
31166 <li>2012
31167 <ul>
31168
31169 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
31170
31171 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
31172
31173 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
31174
31175 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
31176
31177 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
31178
31179 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
31180
31181 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
31182
31183 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
31184
31185 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
31186
31187 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
31188
31189 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
31190
31191 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
31192
31193 </ul></li>
31194
31195 <li>2011
31196 <ul>
31197
31198 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
31199
31200 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
31201
31202 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
31203
31204 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
31205
31206 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
31207
31208 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
31209
31210 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
31211
31212 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
31213
31214 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
31215
31216 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
31217
31218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
31219
31220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
31221
31222 </ul></li>
31223
31224 <li>2010
31225 <ul>
31226
31227 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
31228
31229 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
31230
31231 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
31232
31233 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
31234
31235 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
31236
31237 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
31238
31239 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
31240
31241 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
31242
31243 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
31244
31245 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
31246
31247 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
31248
31249 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
31250
31251 </ul></li>
31252
31253 <li>2009
31254 <ul>
31255
31256 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
31257
31258 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
31259
31260 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
31261
31262 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
31263
31264 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
31265
31266 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
31267
31268 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
31269
31270 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
31271
31272 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
31273
31274 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
31275
31276 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
31277
31278 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
31279
31280 </ul></li>
31281
31282 <li>2008
31283 <ul>
31284
31285 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
31286
31287 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
31288
31289 </ul></li>
31290
31291 </ul>
31292
31293
31294
31295 <h2>Tags</h2>
31296 <ul>
31297
31298 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
31299
31300 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
31301
31302 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
31303
31304 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
31305
31306 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
31307
31308 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
31309
31310 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
31311
31312 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
31313
31314 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (161)</a></li>
31315
31316 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
31317
31318 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
31319
31320 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
31321
31322 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
31323
31324 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
31325
31326 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
31327
31328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (381)</a></li>
31329
31330 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
31331
31332 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
31333
31334 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
31335
31336 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
31337
31338 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
31339
31340 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
31341
31342 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
31343
31344 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
31345
31346 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
31347
31348 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
31349
31350 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
31351
31352 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
31353
31354 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
31355
31356 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
31357
31358 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
31359
31360 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (41)</a></li>
31361
31362 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (10)</a></li>
31363
31364 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (299)</a></li>
31365
31366 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
31367
31368 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
31369
31370 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
31371
31372 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
31373
31374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (107)</a></li>
31375
31376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
31377
31378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
31379
31380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
31381
31382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
31383
31384 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
31385
31386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
31387
31388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
31389
31390 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
31391
31392 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (54)</a></li>
31393
31394 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
31395
31396 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
31397
31398 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
31399
31400 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
31401
31402 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
31403
31404 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
31405
31406 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
31407
31408 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
31409
31410 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
31411
31412 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (11)</a></li>
31413
31414 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (66)</a></li>
31415
31416 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
31417
31418 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (41)</a></li>
31419
31420 </ul>
31421
31422
31423 </div>
31424 <p style="text-align: right">
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