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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/Blockchain_and_IoT_articles_accepted_into_Records_Management_Journal.html">Blockchain and IoT articles accepted into Records Management Journal</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         27th February 2020
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>On Tuesday, two scietific articles we have been working on for a
  32 while, was finally accepted for publication into
  33 <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/0956-5698">Records
  34 Management Journal</a>.  Still waiting for the assigned DOI urls to
  35 start working, but you can have a look at the LaTeX originals here.</p>
  36
  37 <p>The first article is
  38 "<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-02-25-rmj-iot-record-keeping.pdf">A
  39 record-keeping approach to managing IoT-data for government
  40 agencies</a>" (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0056">DOI
  41 10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0056</a>) by Thomas Sødring, Petter Reinholdtsen
  42 and David Massey, and sketches some approaches for storing measurement
  43 data (aka Internet of Things sensor data) in a archive, thus providing
  44 a well defined mechanism for screening and deletion of the information </p>
  45
  46 <p>The second article is
  47 "<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-02-25-rmj-block-chain-record-keeping.pdf">Publishing
  48 and using record-keeping structural information in a blockchain</a>"
  49 (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0050">DOI
  50 10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0050<a/>) by Thomas Sødring, Petter Reinholdtsen
  51 and Svein Ølnes, where we describe a way for third parties to validate
  52 authenticity and thus improve trust in the records kept in a
  53 archive.</p>
  54
  55 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  56 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  57 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  58
  59       </div>
  60       <div class="tags">
  61
  62
  63         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>.
  64
  65
  66       </div>
  67     </div>
  68     <div class="padding"></div>
  69
  70     <div class="entry">
  71       <div class="title">
  72         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_terms_and_policy_turn_users_away.html">When terms and policy turn users away</a>
  73       </div>
  74       <div class="date">
  75          7th December 2019
  76       </div>
  77       <div class="body">
  78         <p>When asked to accept terms of use and privacy policies that state
  79 it will to remove rights I otherwise had or accept unreasonable terms
  80 undermining my privacy, I choose away the service.  I simply do not
  81 have the conscience to accept terms I have no indention of upholding.
  82 But how are the system and service providers to know how many people
  83 they scared away?  Normally I just quietly walk away.  But today, I
  84 tried a new approach.  I sent the following email (removing the
  85 specifics, as I am not out to take the specific service in question)
  86 to the service provider I decided to not use, to at least give them
  87 one data point on how many users are unhappy with their terms:</p>
  88
  89 <blockquote>
  90 From: Petter Reinholdtsen
  91 <br>Subject: When terms of use turn users away
  92 <br>To: [contact@some.site]
  93 <br>Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2019 16:30:56 +0100
  94
  95 <p>Dear [Site Owner],</p>
  96
  97 <p>I was eager to test the system, as it seemed like a fun and
  98 interesting application of [some] technology, but after reading the
  99 terms of use and privacy policy on &lt;URL:
 100 https://www.[some.site]/terms-of-use &gt; and &lt;URL:
 101 https://www.[some.site]/privacy-policy &gt; I want you to know that I
 102 decided to turn away.  There were several provisions in the terms and
 103 policy turning me off, but the final term that convinced me was being
 104 asked to sign away my right to reverse engineer.</p>
 105
 106 <p>--
 107 <br>Happy hacking
 108 <br>Petter Reinholdtsen</p>
 109 </blockquote>
 110
 111 <p>I do not expect much to come out of it, but sharing it here in case
 112 others want to give something similar a try too.  If companies
 113 discover their terms scare away enough people, perhaps they will be
 114 improved...</p>
 115
 116 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 117 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 118 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 119
 120       </div>
 121       <div class="tags">
 122
 123
 124         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>.
 125
 126
 127       </div>
 128     </div>
 129     <div class="padding"></div>
 130
 131     <div class="entry">
 132       <div class="title">
 133         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_2018_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all 2018 phone calls in Norway?</a>
 134       </div>
 135       <div class="date">
 136         25th November 2019
 137       </div>
 138       <div class="body">
 139         <p>Four years ago, I did a back of the envelope calculation on
 140 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">how
 141 much it would cost to store audio recordings of all the phone calls in
 142 Norway</a>, and came up with NOK 2.1 million / EUR 250 000 for the
 143 year 2013.  It is time to repeat the calculation using updated
 144 numbers.  The calculation is based on how much data storage is needed
 145 for each minute of audio, how many minutes all the calls in Norway
 146 sums up to, multiplied by the cost of data storage.</p>
 147
 148 <p>The number of phone call minutes for 2018 was fetched from
 149 <a href="https://ekomstatistikken.nkom.no/">the NKOM statistics
 150 site</a>, and for 2018, land line calls are listed as 434 238 000
 151 minutes, while mobile phone calls are listed with 7 542 006 000
 152 minutes.  The total number of minutes is thus 7 976 244 000.  For
 153 simplicity, I decided to ignore any advantages in audio compression the
 154 last four years, and continue to assume 60 Kbytes/min as the last
 155 time.</p>
 156
 157 <p>Storage prices still varies a lot, but as last time, I decide to
 158 take a reasonable big and cheap hard drive, and double its price to
 159 include the surrounding costs into account.  A 10 TB disk cost less
 160 than 4500 NOK / 450 EUR these days, and doubling it give 9000 NOK per
 161 10 TB.</p>
 162
 163 <p>So, with the parameters in place, lets update the old table
 164 estimating cost for calls in a given year:</p>
 165
 166 <table border="1">
 167 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
 168 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">1 170 000 / 117 000</td></tr>
 169
 170 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">900 000 / 90 000</td></tr>
 171
 172 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">855 000 / 85 500</td></tr>
 173
 174 <tr><td>2018</td><td align="right">7 976 244 000</td><td align="right">445 TiB</td><td align="right">401 100 / 40 110</td></tr>
 175 </table>
 176
 177 <p>Both the cost of storage and the number of phone call minutes have
 178 dropped since the last time, bringing the cost down to a level where I
 179 guess even small organizations can afford to store the audio recording
 180 from every phone call taken in a year in Norway.  Of course, this is
 181 just the cost of buying the storage equipment.  Maintenance, need to
 182 be included as well, but the volume of a single year is about a single
 183 rack of hard drives, so it is not much more than I could fit in my own
 184 home.  Wonder how much the electricity bill would raise if I had that
 185 kind of storage?  I doubt it would be more than a few tens of thousand
 186 NOK per year.</p>
 187
 188       </div>
 189       <div class="tags">
 190
 191
 192         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>.
 193
 194
 195       </div>
 196     </div>
 197     <div class="padding"></div>
 198
 199     <div class="entry">
 200       <div class="title">
 201         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_movies_that_might_be_legal_to_share_on_the_Internet.html">Norwegian movies that might be legal to share on the Internet</a>
 202       </div>
 203       <div class="date">
 204          1st September 2019
 205       </div>
 206       <div class="body">
 207         <p>While working on identifying and counting movies that can be
 208 legally shared on the Internet, I also looked at the Norwegian movies
 209 listed in IMDb.  So far I have identified 54 candidates published
 210 before 1940 that might no longer be protected by norwegian copyright
 211 law.  Of these, only 29 are available at least in part from the
 212 Norwegian National Library.  It can be assumed that the remaining 25
 213 movies are lost.  It seem most useful to identify the copyright status
 214 of movies that are not lost.  To verify that the movie is really no
 215 longer protected, one need to verify the list of copyright holders and
 216 figure out if and when they died.  I've been able to identify some of
 217 them, but for some it is hard to figure out when they died.</p>
 218
 219 </p>This is the list of 29 movies both available from the library and
 220 possibly no longer protected by copyright law.  The year range
 221 (1909-1979 on the first line) is year of publication and last year
 222 with copyright protection.</p>
 223
 224 <pre>
 225 1909-1979 ( 70 year) NSB Bergensbanen 1909 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347601/
 226 1910-1980 ( 70 year) Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons likfærd - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9299304/
 227 1910-1980 ( 70 year) Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons begravelse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9299300/
 228 1912-1998 ( 86 year) Roald Amundsens Sydpolsferd (1910-1912) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9237500/
 229 1913-2006 ( 93 year) Roald Amundsen på sydpolen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347886/
 230 1917-1987 ( 70 year) Fanden i nøtten - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346964/
 231 1919-2018 ( 99 year) Historien om en gut - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010259/
 232 1920-1990 ( 70 year) Kaksen på Øverland - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011361/
 233 1923-1993 ( 70 year) Norge - en skildring i 6 akter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014319/
 234 1925-1997 ( 72 year) Roald Amundsen - Ellsworths flyveekspedition 1925 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016295/
 235 1925-1995 ( 70 year) En verdensreise, eller Da knold og tott vaskede negrene hvite med 13 sæpen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018948/
 236 1926-1996 ( 70 year) Luftskibet 'Norge's flugt over polhavet - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017090/
 237 1926-1996 ( 70 year) Med 'Maud' over Polhavet - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017129/
 238 1927-1997 ( 70 year) Den store sultan - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017997/
 239 1928-1998 ( 70 year) Noahs ark - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018917/
 240 1928-1998 ( 70 year) Skjæbnen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002652/
 241 1928-1998 ( 70 year) Chefens cigarett - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019896/
 242 1929-1999 ( 70 year) Se Norge - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020378/
 243 1929-1999 ( 70 year) Fra Chr. Michelsen til Kronprins Olav og Prinsesse Martha - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019899/
 244 1930-2000 ( 70 year) Mot ukjent land - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021158/
 245 1930-2000 ( 70 year) Det er natt - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017904/
 246 1930-2000 ( 70 year) Over Besseggen på motorcykel - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347721/
 247 1931-2001 ( 70 year) Glimt fra New York og den Norske koloni - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021913/
 248 1932-2007 ( 75 year) En glad gutt - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022946/
 249 1934-2004 ( 70 year) Den lystige radio-trio - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002628/
 250 1935-2005 ( 70 year) Kronprinsparets reise i Nord Norge - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268411/
 251 1935-2005 ( 70 year) Stormangrep - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017998/
 252 1936-2006 ( 70 year) En fargesymfoni i blått - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002762/
 253 1939-2009 ( 70 year) Til Vesterheimen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032036/
 254 </pre>
 255
 256 To be sure which one of these can be legally shared on the Internet,
 257 in addition to verifying the right holders list is complete, one need
 258 to verify the death year of these persons:
 259
 260 <pre>
 261 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (dead 1910) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0085085/
 262 Gustav Adolf Olsen (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0647652/
 263 Gustav Lund (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0526168/
 264 John W. Brunius (dead 1937) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0116307/
 265 Ola Cornelius (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1227236/
 266 Oskar Omdal (dead 1927) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3116241/
 267 Paul Berge (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074006/
 268 Peter Lykke-Seest (dead 1948) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0528064/
 269 Roald Amundsen (dead 1928) - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0025468/
 270 Sverre Halvorsen (dead 1936) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1299757/
 271 Thomas W. Schwartz (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2616250/
 272 </pre>
 273
 274 <p>Perhaps you can help me figuring death year of those missing it, or
 275 right holders if some are missing in IMDb?  It would be nice to have a
 276 definite list of Norwegian movies that are legal to share on the
 277 Internet.</p>
 278
 279 </p>This is the list of 25 movies not available from the library and
 280 possibly no longer protected by copyright law:</p>
 281
 282 <pre>
 283 1907-2009 (102 year) Fiskerlivets farer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121288/
 284 1912-2018 (106 year) Historien omen moder - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382852/
 285 1912-2002 ( 90 year) Anny - en gatepiges roman - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0002026/
 286 1916-1986 ( 70 year) The Mother Who Paid - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3619226/
 287 1917-2018 (101 year) En vinternat - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008740/
 288 1917-2018 (101 year) Unge hjerter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008719/
 289 1917-2018 (101 year) De forældreløse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0007972/
 290 1918-2018 (100 year) Vor tids helte - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009769/
 291 1918-2018 (100 year) Lodsens datter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009314/
 292 1919-2018 ( 99 year) Æresgjesten - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010939/
 293 1921-2006 ( 85 year) Det nye year? - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347686/
 294 1921-1991 ( 70 year) Under Polarkredsens himmel - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012789/
 295 1923-1993 ( 70 year) Nordenfor polarcirkelen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014318/
 296 1925-1995 ( 70 year) Med 'Stavangerfjord' til Nordkap - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016098/
 297 1926-1996 ( 70 year) Over Atlanterhavet og gjennem Amerika - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017241/
 298 1926-1996 ( 70 year) Hallo! Amerika! - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016945/
 299 1926-1996 ( 70 year) Tigeren Teodors triumf - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008052/
 300 1927-1997 ( 70 year) Rød sultan - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017979/
 301 1927-1997 ( 70 year) Søndagsfiskeren Flag - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018002/
 302 1930-2000 ( 70 year) Ro-ro til fiskeskjær - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017973/
 303 1933-2003 ( 70 year) I kongens klær - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024164/
 304 1934-2004 ( 70 year) Eventyret om de tre bukkene bruse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007963/
 305 1934-2004 ( 70 year) Pål sine høner - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017966/
 306 1937-2007 ( 70 year) Et mesterverk - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019937/
 307 1938-2008 ( 70 year) En Harmony - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007975/
 308 </pre>
 309
 310 <p>Several of these movies completely lack right holder information in
 311 IMDb and elsewhere.  Without access to a copy of the movie, it is
 312 often impossible to get the list of people involved in making the
 313 movie, making it impossible to figure out the correct copyright
 314 status.</p>
 315
 316 <p>Not listed here are the movies still protected by copyright law.
 317 Their copyright terms varies from 79 to 144 years, according to the
 318 information I have available so far.  One of the non-lost movies might
 319 change status next year,
 320 <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008007/">Mustads Mono from 1920</a>.
 321 The next one might be
 322 <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347215/">Hvor isbjørnen ferdes
 323 from 1935</a> in 2024.</p>
 324
 325 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 326 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 327 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 328
 329       </div>
 330       <div class="tags">
 331
 332
 333         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>.
 334
 335
 336       </div>
 337     </div>
 338     <div class="padding"></div>
 339
 340     <div class="entry">
 341       <div class="title">
 342         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_16_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 16,000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
 343       </div>
 344       <div class="date">
 345         10th August 2019
 346       </div>
 347       <div class="body">
 348         <p>The recent announcement of from the New York Public Library on its
 349 results in
 350 <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz4e3e/millions-of-books-are-secretly-in-the-public-domain-you-can-download-them-free">identifying
 351 books published in the USA that are now in the public domain</a>,
 352 inspired me to update the scripts I use to track down movies that are
 353 in the public domain.  This involved updating the script used to
 354 extract lists of movies believed to be in the public domain, to work
 355 with the latest version of the source web sites.  In particular the
 356 new edition of the <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film
 357 Vault</a> web site now seem to list all the films available from that
 358 distributor, bringing the films identified there to more than 12.000
 359 movies, and I was able to connect 46% of these to IMDB titles.</p>
 360
 361 <p>The new total is 16307 IMDB IDs (aka films) in the public domain or
 362 creative commons licensed, and unknown status for 31460 movies
 363 (possibly duplicates of the 16307).</p>
 364
 365 <p>The complete data set is available from
 366 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 367 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.</p>
 368
 369 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
 370 far:</p>
 371
 372 <p><pre>
 373  2361 entries (   50 unique) with and 22472 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
 374  2363 entries (  146 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
 375   299 entries (   32 unique) with and    93 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
 376    88 entries (   52 unique) with and    36 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
 377  3190 entries ( 1532 unique) with and    13 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm-xls.json
 378   620 entries (   24 unique) with and   283 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
 379  1080 entries (  165 unique) with and   651 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
 380   830 entries (   13 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
 381    19 entries (   19 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
 382  7410 entries ( 7101 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
 383  1205 entries (   41 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
 384   163 entries (   22 unique) with and    88 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
 385   158 entries (  103 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
 386   113 entries (    4 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
 387   182 entries (   71 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
 388   248 entries (   85 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
 389   158 entries (    4 unique) with and    64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-mubi.json
 390    85 entries (    1 unique) with and    23 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
 391   520 entries (   22 unique) with and   244 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
 392   343 entries (   14 unique) with and    10 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
 393   701 entries (   16 unique) with and   560 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
 394    74 entries (   13 unique) with and    60 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
 395   698 entries (   16 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
 396  5506 entries ( 2941 unique) with and  6585 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
 397    16 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
 398   110 entries (    2 unique) with and    29 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-two-movies-net.json
 399    73 entries (   20 unique) with and   131 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
 400 16307 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 12509 only in one list, 31460 without IMDB title ID
 401 </pre></p>
 402
 403 <p>New this time is a list of all the identified IMDB titles, with
 404 title, year and running time, provided in free-complete.json.  this
 405 file also indiciate which source is used to conclude the video is free
 406 to distribute.</p>
 407
 408 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 409 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 410 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 411
 412       </div>
 413       <div class="tags">
 414
 415
 416         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>.
 417
 418
 419       </div>
 420     </div>
 421     <div class="padding"></div>
 422
 423     <div class="entry">
 424       <div class="title">
 425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teach_kids_to_protect_their_privacy___the_EDRi_way.html">Teach kids to protect their privacy - the EDRi way</a>
 426       </div>
 427       <div class="date">
 428          4th July 2019
 429       </div>
 430       <div class="body">
 431         <p>Childs need to learn how to guard their privacy too.  To help them,
 432 <a href="https://edri.org/">European Digital Rights (EDRi)</a> created
 433 a colorful booklet providing information on several privacy related topics,
 434 and tips on how to protect ones privacy in the digital age.</p>
 435
 436 <p>The 24 page booklet titled Digital Defenders is
 437 <a href="https://edri.org/digital-defenders-help-kids-defend-their-privacy-around-europe">available
 438 in several languages</a>.  Thanks to the valuable contributions from
 439 members of <a href="https://efn.no/">the Electronic Foundation Norway
 440 (EFN)</a> and others, it is also available in Norwegian Bokmål.
 441 If you would like to have it available in your language too,
 442 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/efn/privacy4kids/">contribute
 443 via Weblate</a> and get in touch.</p>
 444
 445 <p>But a funny, well written and good looking PDF do not have much
 446 impact, unless it is read by the right audience.  To increase the
 447 chance of kids reading it, I am currently assisting EFN in getting
 448 copies printed on paper to distribute on the street and in class
 449 rooms.  Print the booklet was made possible thanks to a small et of
 450 great sponsors.  Thank you very much to each and every one of them!  I
 451 hope to have the printed booklet ready to hand out on Tuesday, when
 452 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/>">the Norwegian Unix Users Group</a> is
 453 organizing <a href="https://wiki.nuug.no/sommerfest2019">its yearly
 454 barbecue for geeks and free software zealots in the Oslo area</a>.  If
 455 you are nearby, feel free to come by and check out the party and the
 456 booklet.</p>
 457
 458 <p>If the booklet prove to be a success, it would be great to get
 459 more sponsoring and distribute it to every kid in the country. :)</p>
 460
 461 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 462 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 463 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 464
 465       </div>
 466       <div class="tags">
 467
 468
 469         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>.
 470
 471
 472       </div>
 473     </div>
 474     <div class="padding"></div>
 475
 476     <div class="entry">
 477       <div class="title">
 478         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client</a>
 479       </div>
 480       <div class="date">
 481         19th June 2019
 482       </div>
 483       <div class="body">
 484         <p>Some years ago, in 2016, I
 485 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">wrote
 486 for the first time about</a> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
 487 It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
 488 system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
 489 own a mobile phone.  Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
 490 aside until it had seen more development.  A few days ago I decided to
 491 give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
 492 to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
 493 calls.  But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.</p>
 494
 495 <p>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
 496 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>.  I
 497 tried doing web search for 'ring' when I discovered it for the first
 498 time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
 499 something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word.  Now
 500 you can search for 'jami' and this client and
 501 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system</a> is the first hit at
 502 least on duckduckgo.</p>
 503
 504 <p>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
 505 calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
 506 if possible.  If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
 507 behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
 508 Jami project.  Jami can also be a normal SIP client.  If the SIP
 509 server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
 510 unencrypted.  This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
 511 do anything without encryption.</p>
 512
 513 <p>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
 514 Android, iOS, and Android TV.  It is included in Debian already.  Jami
 515 also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
 516 while Signal do not.
 517 <a href="https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol">The
 518 protocol</a> is described in the Ring project wiki.  The system uses a
 519 distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
 520 over UDP.  On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
 521 work.  I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
 522 going to ports 1-49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
 523 port and end up in the low range most of the time.  After talking to
 524 the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
 525 settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
 526
 527 peering directly with others.  I've been told the developers are
 528 working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem.  I also ran
 529 into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
 530 Debian Stable (Stretch).  Apparently the protocol changed between
 531 beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
 532 Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
 533 future.</p>
 534
 535 <p>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
 536 came across another communication platform I have not tested yet.  The
 537 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)">Tox protocol</a>
 538 and <a href="https://tox.chat/">family of Tox clients</a>.  It might
 539 become the topic of a future blog post.</p>
 540
 541 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 542 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 543 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 544
 545       </div>
 546       <div class="tags">
 547
 548
 549         Tags: <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>.
 550
 551
 552       </div>
 553     </div>
 554     <div class="padding"></div>
 555
 556     <div class="entry">
 557       <div class="title">
 558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions__2019_edition_.html">More sales number for my Free Culture paper editions (2019-edition)</a>
 559       </div>
 560       <div class="date">
 561         11th June 2019
 562       </div>
 563       <div class="body">
 564         <p>The first book I published,
 565 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture by Lawrence
 566 Lessig</a>, is still selling a few copies.  Not a lot, but enough to
 567 have contributed slightly over $500 to the <a
 568 href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons Corporation</a>
 569 so far.  All the profit is sent there. Most books are still sold via
 570 Amazon (83 copies), with Ingram second (49) and Lulu (12) and Machette (7) as
 571 minor channels.  Bying directly from Lulu bring the largest cut to
 572 Creative Commons.  The English Edition sold 80 copies so far, the
 573 French 59 copies, and Norwegian only 8 copies.  Nothing impressive,
 574 but nice to see the work we put down is still being appreciated.  The
 575 ebook edition is available for free from
 576 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
 577
 578 <table border="0">
 579 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th>
 580 <th colspan="7">Quantity</th></tr>
 581 <tr>
 582 <th>2016 jan-jun</th>
 583 <th>2016 jul-dec</th>
 584 <th>2017 jan-jun</th>
 585 <th>2017 jul-dec</th>
 586 <th>2018 jan-jun</th>
 587 <th>2018 jul-dec</th>
 588 <th>2019 jan-may</th>
 589 </tr>
 590
 591 <tr>
 592   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
 593   <td align="right">3</td>
 594   <td align="right">6</td>
 595   <td align="right">19</td>
 596   <td align="right">11</td>
 597   <td align="right">7</td>
 598   <td align="right">6</td>
 599   <td align="right">7</td>
 600 </tr>
 601
 602 <tr>
 603   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
 604   <td align="right">7</td>
 605   <td align="right">1</td>
 606   <td align="right">0</td>
 607   <td align="right">0</td>
 608   <td align="right">0</td>
 609   <td align="right">0</td>
 610   <td align="right">0</td>
 611 </tr>
 612
 613 <tr>
 614   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
 615   <td align="right">14</td>
 616   <td align="right">27</td>
 617   <td align="right">16</td>
 618   <td align="right">9</td>
 619   <td align="right">3</td>
 620   <td align="right">7</td>
 621   <td align="right">3</td>
 622 </tr>
 623
 624 <tr>
 625   <td>Total</td>
 626   <td align="right">24</td>
 627   <td align="right">34</td>
 628   <td align="right">35</td>
 629   <td align="right">20</td>
 630   <td align="right">10</td>
 631   <td align="right">13</td>
 632   <td align="right">10</td>
 633 </tr>
 634
 635 </table>
 636
 637 <p>It is fun to see the French edition being more popular than the
 638 English one.</p>
 639
 640 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
 641 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
 642 touch.</p>
 643
 644       </div>
 645       <div class="tags">
 646
 647
 648         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>.
 649
 650
 651       </div>
 652     </div>
 653     <div class="padding"></div>
 654
 655     <div class="entry">
 656       <div class="title">
 657         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Official_MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html">Official MIME type "text/vnd.sosi" for SOSI map data</a>
 658       </div>
 659       <div class="date">
 660          4th June 2019
 661       </div>
 662       <div class="body">
 663         <p>Just 15 days ago,
 664 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html">I
 665 mentioned</a> my submission to IANA to register an official MIME type
 666 for the SOSI vector map format.  This morning, just an hour ago, I was
 667 notified that
 668 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/vnd.sosi">the
 669 MIME type "text/vnd.sosi"</a> is registered for this format.  In
 670 addition to this registration, my
 671 <a href="https://github.com/file/file/blob/master/magic/Magdir/sosi">file(1)
 672 patch for a pattern matching rule for SOSI files</a> has been accepted
 673 into the official source of that program (pending a new release), and
 674 I've been told by the team behind
 675 <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/">PRONOM</a> that
 676 the SOSI format will be included in the next release of PRONOM, which
 677 they plan to release this summer around July.</p>
 678
 679 <p>I am very happy to see all of this fall into place, for use by
 680 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/">the
 681 Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt</a> implementations.</p>
 682
 683 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 684 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 685 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 686
 687       </div>
 688       <div class="tags">
 689
 690
 691         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/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 692
 693
 694       </div>
 695     </div>
 696     <div class="padding"></div>
 697
 698     <div class="entry">
 699       <div class="title">
 700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_space_rover_coquine__or_how_I_ended_up_on_the_dark_side_of_the_moon.html">The space rover coquine, or how I ended up on the dark side of the moon</a>
 701       </div>
 702       <div class="date">
 703          2nd June 2019
 704       </div>
 705       <div class="body">
 706         <p>A while back a college and friend from Debian and the Skolelinux /
 707 Debian Edu project approached me, asking if I knew someone that might
 708 be interested in helping out with a technology project he was running
 709 as a teacher at <a href="https://www.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/">L'école
 710 franco-danoise</a> - the Danish-French school and kindergarden.  The
 711 kids were building robots, rovers.  The story behind it is to build a
 712 rover for use
 713 <a href="http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/first-week-on-the-dark-side">on
 714 the dark side of the moon</a>, and remote control it.  As travel cost
 715 was a bit high for the final destination, and they wanted to test the
 716 concept first, he was looking for volunteers to host a rover for the
 717 kids to control in a foreign country.  I ended up volunteering as a
 718 host, and last week the rover arrived.  It took a while to arrive
 719 after <a href="http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/model-moms">it was
 720 built and shipped</a>, because of customs confusion.  Luckily we were
 721 able fix it quickly with help from my colleges at work.</p>
 722
 723 <p>This is what it looked like when the rover arrived.  Note the cute
 724 eyes looking up on me from the wrapping</p>
 725
 726 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-esken-med-det-rare-i.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
 727 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-den-ser-meg.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
 728 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-en-skrue-loes.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
 729
 730 <p style="text-align:left">Once the robot arrived, we needed to track
 731 down batteries and figure out how to build custom firmware for it with
 732 the appropriate wifi settings.  I asked a friend if I could get two
 733 18650 batteries from his pile of Tesla batteries (he had them from the
 734 wrack of a crashed Tesla), so now the rover is running on Tesla
 735 batteries.</p>
 736
 737 <p>Building
 738 <a href="https://gitlab.com/ecolefrancodanoise/arduino-efd/">the rover
 739 firmware</a> proved a bit harder, as the code did not work out of the
 740 box with the Arduino IDE package in Debian Buster.  I suspect this is
 741 due to a unsolved
 742 <a href="https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/2703"> license problem
 743 with arduino</a> blocking Debian from upgrading to the latest version.
 744 In the end we gave up debugging why the IDE failed to find the
 745 required libraries, and ended up using the Arduino Makefile from the
 746 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/arduino-mk">arduino-mk Debian
 747 package</a> instead.  Unfortunately the camera library is missing from
 748 the Arduino environment in Debian, so we disabled the camera support
 749 for the first firmware build, to get something up and running.  With
 750 this reduced firmware, the robot could be controlled via the
 751 controller server, driving around and measuring distance using its
 752 internal acoustic sensor.</p>
 753
 754 <p>Next, With some help from my friend in Denmark, which checked in the
 755 camera library into the gitlab repository for me to use, we were able
 756 to build a new and more complete version of the firmware, and the
 757 robot is now up and running.  This is what the "commander" web page
 758 look like after taking a measurement and a snapshot:</p>
 759
 760 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-commander.png" width="40%" border="1" align="center"/>
 761
 762 <p>If you want to learn more about this project, you can check out the
 763 <a href="https://hackaday.io/project/164082-the-dark-side-challenge">The
 764 Dark Side Challenge</a> Hackaday web pages.</p>
 765
 766 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 767 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 768 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 769
 770       </div>
 771       <div class="tags">
 772
 773
 774         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>.
 775
 776
 777       </div>
 778     </div>
 779     <div class="padding"></div>
 780
 781     <div class="entry">
 782       <div class="title">
 783         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nikita_version_0_4_released___free_software_archive_API_server.html">Nikita version 0.4 released - free software archive API server</a>
 784       </div>
 785       <div class="date">
 786         22nd May 2019
 787       </div>
 788       <div class="body">
 789         <p>This morning,  a new release of
 790 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
 791 Noark 5 core project</a> was
 792 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2019-May/000468.html">announced
 793 on the project mailing list</a>.  The Nikita free software solution is
 794 an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by
 795 government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in version 0.4
 796 since version 0.3, see the email link above for links to a demo site:</p>
 797
 798 <ul>
 799
 800   <li>Roll out OData handling to all endpoints where applicable</li>
 801   <li>Changed the relation key for "ny-journalpost" to the official one.</li>
 802   <li>Better link generation on outgoing links.</li>
 803   <li>Tidy up code and make code and approaches more consistent throughout
 804    the codebase</li>
 805   <li>Update rels to be in compliance with updated version in the
 806    interface standard</li>
 807   <li>Avoid printing links on empty objects as they can't have links</li>
 808   <li>Small bug fixes and improvements</li>
 809   <li>Start moving generation of outgoing links to @Service layer so access
 810    control can be used when generating links</li>
 811   <li>Log exception that was being swallowed so it's traceable</li>
 812   <li>Fix name mapping problem</li>
 813   <li>Update templated printing so templated should only be printed if it
 814    is set true. Requires more work to roll out across entire
 815    application.</li>
 816   <li>Remove Record->DocumentObject as per domain model of n5v4</li>
 817   <li>Add ability to delete lists filtered with OData</li>
 818   <li>Return NO_CONTENT (204) on delete as per interface standard</li>
 819   <li>Introduce support for ConstraintViolationException exception</li>
 820   <li>Make Service classes extend NoarkService</li>
 821   <li>Make code base respect X-Forwarded-Host, X-Forwarded-Proto and
 822    X-Forwarded-Port</li>
 823   <li>Update CorrespondencePart* code to be more in line with Single
 824    Responsibility Principle</li>
 825   <li>Make package name follow directory structure</li>
 826   <li>Make sure Document number starts at 1, not 0</li>
 827   <li>Fix isues discovered by FindBugs</li>
 828   <li>Update from Date to ZonedDateTime</li>
 829   <li>Fix wrong tablename</li>
 830   <li>Introduce Service layer tests</li>
 831   <li>Improvements to CorrespondencePart</li>
 832   <li>Continued work on Class / Classificationsystem</li>
 833   <li>Fix feature where authors were stored as storageLocations</li>
 834   <li>Update HQL builder for OData</li>
 835   <li>Update OData search capability from webpage</li>
 836
 837 </ul>
 838
 839 <p>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
 840 you, please contact us on IRC
 841 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
 842 irc.freenode.net</a>) or email
 843 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
 844 mailing list</a>).</p>
 845
 846 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 847 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 848 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 849
 850       </div>
 851       <div class="tags">
 852
 853
 854         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
 855
 856
 857       </div>
 858     </div>
 859     <div class="padding"></div>
 860
 861     <div class="entry">
 862       <div class="title">
 863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html">MIME type "text/vnd.sosi" for SOSI map data</a>
 864       </div>
 865       <div class="date">
 866         20th May 2019
 867       </div>
 868       <div class="body">
 869         <p>As part of my involvement in the work to
 870 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard">standardise
 871 a REST based API for Noark 5</a>, the Norwegian archiving standard, I
 872 spent some time the last few months to try to register a
 873 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/">MIME type</a>
 874 and <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/">PRONOM
 875 code</a> for the SOSI file format.  The background is that there is a
 876 set of formats approved for long term storage and archiving in Norway,
 877 and among these formats, SOSI is the only format missing a MIME type
 878 and PRONOM code.</p>
 879
 880 <p>What is SOSI, you might ask?  To quote Wikipedia: SOSI is short for
 881 Samordnet Opplegg for Stedfestet Informasjon (literally "Coordinated
 882 Approach for Spatial Information", but more commonly expanded in
 883 English to Systematic Organization of Spatial Information).  It is a
 884 text based file format for geo-spatial vector information used in
 885 Norway.  Information about the SOSI format can be found in English
 886 from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSI">Wikipedia</a>.  The
 887 specification is available in Norwegian from
 888 <a href="https://www.kartverket.no/geodataarbeid/Standarder/SOSI/">the
 889 Norwegian mapping authority</a>.  The SOSI standard, which originated
 890 in the beginning of nineteen eighties, was the inspiration and formed the
 891 basis for the XML based
 892 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language">Geography
 893 Markup Language</a>.</p>
 894
 895 <p>I have so far written
 896 <a href="https://github.com/file/file/pull/67">a pattern matching
 897 rule</a> for the file(1) unix tool to recognize SOSI files, submitted
 898 a request to the PRONOM project to have a PRONOM ID assigned to the
 899 format (reference TNA1555078202S60), and today send a request to IANA
 900 to register the "text/vnd.sosi" MIME type for this format (referanse
 901 <a href="https://tools.iana.org/public-view/viewticket/1143144">IANA
 902 #1143144</a>).  If all goes well, in a few months, anyone implementing
 903 the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt API spesification should be able to
 904 use an official MIME type and PRONOM code for SOSI files.  In
 905 addition, anyone using SOSI files on Linux should be able to
 906 automatically recognise the format and web sites handing out SOSI
 907 files can begin providing a more specific MIME type.  So far, SOSI
 908 files has been handed out from web sites using the
 909 "application/octet-stream" MIME type, which is just a nice way of
 910 stating "I do not know".  Soon, we will know. :)</p>
 911
 912 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 913 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 914 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 915
 916       </div>
 917       <div class="tags">
 918
 919
 920         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/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 921
 922
 923       </div>
 924     </div>
 925     <div class="padding"></div>
 926
 927     <div class="entry">
 928       <div class="title">
 929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PlantUML_for_text_based_UML_diagram_modelling___nice_free_software.html">PlantUML for text based UML diagram modelling - nice free software</a>
 930       </div>
 931       <div class="date">
 932         25th March 2019
 933       </div>
 934       <div class="body">
 935         <p>As part of my involvement with the
 936 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
 937 Noark 5 core project</a>, I have been proposing improvements to the
 938 API specification created by <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/">The
 939 National Archives of Norway</a> and helped migrating the text from a
 940 version control system unfriendly binary format (docx) to Markdown in
 941 git.  Combined with the migration to a public git repository (on
 942 github), this has made it possible for anyone to suggest improvement
 943 to the text.</p>
 944
 945 <p>The specification is filled with UML diagrams.  I believe the
 946 original diagrams were modelled using Sparx Systems Enterprise
 947 Architect, and exported as EMF files for import into docx.  This
 948 approach make it very hard to track changes using a version control
 949 system.  To improve the situation I have been looking for a good text
 950 based UML format with associated command line free software tools on
 951 Linux and Windows, to allow anyone to send in corrections to the UML
 952 diagrams in the specification.  The tool must be text based to work
 953 with git, and command line to be able to run it automatically to
 954 generate the diagram images.  Finally, it must be free software to
 955 allow anyone, even those that can not accept a non-free software
 956 license, to contribute.</p>
 957
 958 <p>I did not know much about free software UML modelling tools when I
 959 started.  I have used dia and inkscape for simple modelling in the
 960 past, but neither are available on Windows, as far as I could tell.  I
 961 came across a nice
 962 <a href="https://modeling-languages.com/text-uml-tools-complete-list/">list
 963 of text mode uml tools</a>, and tested out a few of the tools listed
 964 there.  <a href="http://plantuml.com/">The PlantUML tool</a> seemed
 965 most promising.  After verifying that the packages
 966 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plantuml">is available in
 967 Debian</a> and found <a href="https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml">its
 968 Java source</a> under a GPL license on github, I set out to test if it
 969 could represent the diagrams we needed, ie the ones currently in
 970 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/">the
 971 Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification</a>.  I am happy to report
 972 that it could represent them, even thought it have a few warts here
 973 and there.</p>
 974
 975 <p>After a few days of modelling I completed the task this weekend.  A
 976 temporary link to the complete set of diagrams (original and from
 977 PlantUML) is available in
 978 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/issues/76">the
 979 github issue discussing the need for a text based UML format</a>, but
 980 please note I lack a sensible tool to convert EMF files to PNGs, so
 981 the "original" rendering is not as good as the original was in the
 982 publised PDF.</p>
 983
 984 <p>Here is an example UML diagram, showing the core classes for
 985 keeping metadata about archived documents:</p>
 986
 987 <pre>
 988 @startuml
 989 skinparam classAttributeIconSize 0
 990
 991 !include media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml
 992 !include media/uml-class-arkiv.iuml
 993 !include media/uml-class-klassifikasjonssystem.iuml
 994 !include media/uml-class-klasse.iuml
 995 !include media/uml-class-arkivdel.iuml
 996 !include media/uml-class-mappe.iuml
 997 !include media/uml-class-merknad.iuml
 998 !include media/uml-class-registrering.iuml
 999 !include media/uml-class-basisregistrering.iuml
1000 !include media/uml-class-dokumentbeskrivelse.iuml
1001 !include media/uml-class-dokumentobjekt.iuml
1002 !include media/uml-class-konvertering.iuml
1003 !include media/uml-datatype-elektronisksignatur.iuml
1004
1005 Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper "+arkivskaper 1..*" <-o "+arkiv 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
1006 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv o--> "+underarkiv 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
1007 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv "+arkiv 1" o--> "+arkivdel 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
1008 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem "+klassifikasjonssystem [0..1]" <--o "+arkivdel 1..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
1009 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem "+klassifikasjonssystem [0..1]" o--> "+klasse 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Klasse
1010 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel "+arkivdel 0..1" o--> "+mappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
1011 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel "+arkivdel 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
1012 Arkivstruktur.Klasse "+klasse 0..1" o--> "+mappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
1013 Arkivstruktur.Klasse "+klasse 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
1014 Arkivstruktur.Mappe --> "+undermappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
1015 Arkivstruktur.Mappe "+mappe 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
1016 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Mappe
1017 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
1018 Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering -|> Arkivstruktur.Registrering
1019 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering
1020 Arkivstruktur.Registrering "+registrering 1..*" o--> "+dokumentbeskrivelse 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
1021 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse "+dokumentbeskrivelse 1" o-> "+dokumentobjekt 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
1022 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt *-> "+konvertering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Konvertering
1023 Arkivstruktur.ElektroniskSignatur -[hidden]-> Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
1024 @enduml
1025 </pre>
1026
1027 <p><a href="http://plantuml.com/class-diagram">The format</a> is quite
1028 compact, with little redundant information.  The text expresses
1029 entities and relations, and there is little layout related fluff.  One
1030 can reuse content by using include files, allowing for consistent
1031 naming across several diagrams.  The include files can be standalone
1032 PlantUML too.  Here is the content of
1033 <tt>media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml<tt>:</p>
1034
1035 <pre>
1036 @startuml
1037 class Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper <Arkivenhet> {
1038   +arkivskaperID : string
1039   +arkivskaperNavn : string
1040   +beskrivelse : string [0..1]
1041 }
1042 @enduml
1043 </pre>
1044
1045 <p>This is what the complete diagram for the PlantUML notation above
1046 look like:</p>
1047
1048 <p><img width="80%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-03-25-noark5-plantuml-diagrameksempel.png"></p>
1049
1050 <p>A cool feature of PlantUML is that the generated PNG files include
1051 the entire original source diagram as text.  The source (with include
1052 statements expanded) can be extracted using for example
1053 <tt>exiftool</tt>.  Another cool feature is that parts of the entities
1054 can be hidden after inclusion.  This allow to use include files with
1055 all attributes listed, even for UML diagrams that should not list any
1056 attributes.</p>
1057
1058 <p>The diagram also show some of the warts.  Some times the layout
1059 engine place text labels on top of each other, and some times it place
1060 the class boxes too close to each other, not leaving room for the
1061 labels on the relationship arrows.  The former can be worked around by
1062 placing extra newlines in the labes (ie "\n").  I did not do it here
1063 to be able to demonstrate the issue.  I have not found a good way
1064 around the latter, so I normally try to reduce the problem by changing
1065 from vertical to horizontal links to improve the layout.</p>
1066
1067 <p>All in all, I am quite happy with PlantUML, and very impressed with
1068 how quickly its lead developer responds to questions.  So far I got an
1069 answer to my questions in a few hours when I send an email.  I
1070 definitely recommend looking at PlantUML if you need to make UML
1071 diagrams.  Note, PlantUML can draw a lot more than class relations.
1072 Check out the documention for a complete list. :)</p>
1073
1074 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1075 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1076 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1077
1078       </div>
1079       <div class="tags">
1080
1081
1082         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/noark5">noark5</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>.
1083
1084
1085       </div>
1086     </div>
1087     <div class="padding"></div>
1088
1089     <div class="entry">
1090       <div class="title">
1091         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_3_of_free_software_archive_API_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.3 of free software archive API system Nikita announced</a>
1092       </div>
1093       <div class="date">
1094         24th March 2019
1095       </div>
1096       <div class="body">
1097         <p>Yesterday,  a new release of
1098 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
1099 Noark 5 core project</a> was
1100 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2019-March/000451.html">announced
1101 on the project mailing list</a>.  The free software solution is an
1102 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by
1103 government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in version 0.3
1104 since version 0.2.1 (from NEWS.md):</p>
1105
1106 <ul>
1107   <li>Improved ClassificationSystem and Class behaviour.</li>
1108   <li>Tidied up known inconsistencies between domain model and hateaos links.</li>
1109   <li>Added experimental code for blockchain integration.  </li>
1110   <li>Make token expiry time configurable at upstart from properties file.</li>
1111   <li>Continued work on OData search syntax.</li>
1112   <li>Started work on pagination for entities, partly implemented for Saksmappe.</li>
1113   <li>Finalise ClassifiedCode Metadata entity.</li>
1114   <li>Implement mechanism to check if authentication token is still
1115    valid.  This allow the GUI to return a more sensible message to the
1116    user if the token is expired.</li>
1117   <li>Reintroduce browse.html page to allow user to browse JSON API using
1118    hateoas links.</li>
1119   <li>Fix bug in handling file/mappe sequence number.  Year change was
1120    not properly handled.</li>
1121   <li>Update application yml files to be in sync with current development.</li>
1122   <li>Stop 'converting' everything to PDF using libreoffice.  Only
1123    convert the file formats doc, ppt, xls, docx, pptx, xlsx, odt, odp
1124    and ods.</li>
1125   <li>Continued code style fixing, making code more readable.</li>
1126   <li>Minor bug fixes.</li>
1127
1128 </ul>
1129
1130 <p>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
1131 you, please contact us on IRC
1132 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
1133 irc.freenode.net</a>) or email
1134 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
1135 mailing list</a>).</p>
1136
1137 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1138 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1139 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1140
1141       </div>
1142       <div class="tags">
1143
1144
1145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
1146
1147
1148       </div>
1149     </div>
1150     <div class="padding"></div>
1151
1152     <div class="entry">
1153       <div class="title">
1154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Websocket_from_Kraken_in_Valutakrambod.html">Websocket from Kraken in Valutakrambod</a>
1155       </div>
1156       <div class="date">
1157          1st February 2019
1158       </div>
1159       <div class="body">
1160         <p>Yesterday, the Kraken virtual currency exchange announced
1161 <a href="https://blog.kraken.com/post/2019/websockets-public-api-launching-soon/">their
1162 Websocket service</a>, providing a stream of exchange updates to its
1163 clients.  Getting updated rates quickly is a good idea, so I used
1164 their <a href="https://www.kraken.com/en-us/help/websocket-api">API
1165 documentation</a> and added Websocket support to the Kraken service in
1166 Valutakrambod today.  The python library can now get updates
1167 from Kraken several times per second, instead of every time the
1168 information is polled from the REST API.</p>
1169
1170 <p>If this sound interesting to you, the code for valutakrambod is
1171 available from
1172 <a href="http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod">github</a>.
1173 Here is example output from the example client displaying rates in a
1174 curses view:</p>
1175
1176 <p><blockquote><pre>
1177            Name Pair   Bid         Ask         Spr    Ftcd    Age
1178  BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR   2959.2800   3021.0500   2.0%   36    nan    nan
1179        Bitfinex BTCEUR   3087.9000   3088.0000   0.0%   36     37    nan
1180         Bitmynt BTCEUR   3001.8700   3135.4600   4.3%   36     52    nan
1181          Bitpay BTCEUR   3003.8659         nan   nan%   35    nan    nan
1182        Bitstamp BTCEUR   3008.0000   3010.2300   0.1%    0      1      1
1183            Bl3p BTCEUR   3000.6700   3010.9300   0.3%    1    nan    nan
1184        Coinbase BTCEUR   2992.1800   3023.2500   1.0%   34    nan    nan
1185          Kraken+BTCEUR   3005.7000   3006.6000   0.0%    0      1      0
1186         Paymium BTCEUR   2940.0100   2993.4400   1.8%    0   2688    nan
1187  BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK  29000.0000  29360.7400   1.2%   36    nan    nan
1188         Bitmynt BTCNOK  29115.6400  29720.7500   2.0%   36     52    nan
1189          Bitpay BTCNOK  29029.2512         nan   nan%   36    nan    nan
1190        Coinbase BTCNOK  28927.6000  29218.5900   1.0%   35    nan    nan
1191         MiraiEx BTCNOK  29097.7000  29741.4200   2.2%   36    nan    nan
1192  BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD   3385.4200   3456.0900   2.0%   36    nan    nan
1193        Bitfinex BTCUSD   3538.5000   3538.6000   0.0%   36     45    nan
1194          Bitpay BTCUSD   3443.4600         nan   nan%   34    nan    nan
1195        Bitstamp BTCUSD   3443.0100   3445.0500   0.1%    0      2      1
1196        Coinbase BTCUSD   3428.1600   3462.6300   1.0%   33    nan    nan
1197          Gemini BTCUSD   3445.8800   3445.8900   0.0%   36    326    nan
1198          Hitbtc BTCUSD   3473.4700   3473.0700  -0.0%    0      0      0
1199          Kraken+BTCUSD   3444.4000   3445.6000   0.0%    0      1      0
1200   Exchangerates EURNOK      9.6685      9.6685   0.0%   36  22226    nan
1201      Norgesbank EURNOK      9.6685      9.6685   0.0%   36  22226    nan
1202        Bitstamp EURUSD      1.1440      1.1462   0.2%    0      1      2
1203   Exchangerates EURUSD      1.1471      1.1471   0.0%   36  22226    nan
1204  BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR      1.0009     22.6538  95.6%   35    nan    nan
1205  BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK    259.0900    264.9300   2.2%   35    nan    nan
1206  BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD      0.0000     29.0000 100.0%   35    nan    nan
1207      Norgesbank USDNOK      8.4286      8.4286   0.0%   36  22226    nan
1208 </pre></blockquote></p>
1209
1210 <p>Yes, I notice the strange negative spread on Hitbtc.  I've seen the
1211 same on Kraken.  Another strange observation is that Kraken some times
1212 announce trade orders a fraction of a second in the future.  I really
1213 wonder what is going on there.</p>
1214
1215 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1216 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1217 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1218
1219       </div>
1220       <div class="tags">
1221
1222
1223         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>.
1224
1225
1226       </div>
1227     </div>
1228     <div class="padding"></div>
1229
1230     <div class="entry">
1231       <div class="title">
1232         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
1233       </div>
1234       <div class="date">
1235         22nd January 2019
1236       </div>
1237       <div class="body">
1238         <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
1239 everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
1240 micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive.  All this is
1241 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
1242 packaging team.  The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
1243 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
1244 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
1245 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
1246
1247 <p>There are three main pieces involved.  The first to enter Debian
1248 was
1249 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
1250 which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12.  The next one was
1251 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
1252 showed up 2019-01-13.  The final and hardest part to to into the
1253 archive was
1254 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
1255 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
1256 before it was accepted 2019-01-20.  The last one is already in Debian
1257 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days.  This
1258 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
1259 'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
1260 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
1261 catered for.</p>
1262
1263 <p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
1264 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
1265 package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
1266 package.  This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
1267 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
1268 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
1269
1270 <p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
1271
1272 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1273 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1274 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1275
1276       </div>
1277       <div class="tags">
1278
1279
1280         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1281
1282
1283       </div>
1284     </div>
1285     <div class="padding"></div>
1286
1287     <div class="entry">
1288       <div class="title">
1289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/CasparCG_Server_for_TV_broadcast_playout_in_Debian.html">CasparCG Server for TV broadcast playout in Debian</a>
1290       </div>
1291       <div class="date">
1292         15th January 2019
1293       </div>
1294       <div class="body">
1295         <p>The layered video playout server created by Sveriges Television,
1296 <a href="https://casparcg.com/">CasparCG Server</a>, entered Debian
1297 today.  This completes many months of work to get the source ready to
1298 go into Debian.  The first upload to the Debian NEW queue happened a
1299 month ago, but the work upstream to prepare it for Debian started more
1300 than two and a half month ago.  So far
1301 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/casparcg-server">the
1302 casparcg-server package</a> is only available for amd64, but I hope
1303 this can be improved.  The package is in contrib because it depend on
1304 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdk-aac">non-free fdk-aac
1305 library</a>.  The Debian package lack support for streaming web pages
1306 because Debian is missing CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework.  CEF is
1307 wanted by several packages in Debian.  But because the Chromium source
1308 is <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/893448">not available as a build
1309 dependency</a>, it is not yet possible to upload CEF to Debian.  I
1310 hope this will change in the future.</p>
1311
1312 <p>The reason I got involved is that
1313 <a href="https://frikanalen.no/">the Norwegian open channel
1314 Frikanalen</a> is starting to use CasparCG for our HD playout, and I
1315 would like to have all the free software tools we use to run the TV
1316 channel available as packages from the Debian project.  The last
1317 remaining piece in the puzzle is Open Broadcast Encoder, but it depend
1318 on quite a lot of patched libraries which would have to be included in
1319 Debian first.</p>
1320
1321 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1322 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1323 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1324
1325       </div>
1326       <div class="tags">
1327
1328
1329         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>.
1330
1331
1332       </div>
1333     </div>
1334     <div class="padding"></div>
1335
1336     <div class="entry">
1337       <div class="title">
1338         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
1339       </div>
1340       <div class="date">
1341         15th December 2018
1342       </div>
1343       <div class="body">
1344         <p>A fun way to learn how to program
1345 <a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
1346 instructions in the book
1347 "<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
1348 with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
1349 who like to play with Minecraft.  The book uses a Python library to
1350 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
1351 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
1352 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
1353 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
1354 Minecraft.  The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
1355 and Raspian.  But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
1356 recipes using the free software construction game
1357 <a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
1358
1359 <p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
1360 Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
1361 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
1362 I
1363 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
1364 this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
1365 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
1366 Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away.  The Debian package is
1367 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
1368 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
1369 packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
1370 Salsa.</p>
1371
1372 <p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
1373 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
1374 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
1375 provided via modules in Minetest.  Without the required blocks, a
1376 simple stone block is used instead.  My initial testing with a analog
1377 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
1378 instead used stone arms.</p>
1379
1380 <p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
1381 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes.  The
1382 <a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
1383 I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
1384 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup.  Are there any
1385 options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
1386
1387 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1388 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1389 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1390
1391       </div>
1392       <div class="tags">
1393
1394
1395         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1396
1397
1398       </div>
1399     </div>
1400     <div class="padding"></div>
1401
1402     <div class="entry">
1403       <div class="title">
1404         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Non_blocking_bittorrent_plugin_for_vlc.html">Non-blocking bittorrent plugin for vlc</a>
1405       </div>
1406       <div class="date">
1407         12th December 2018
1408       </div>
1409       <div class="body">
1410         <p>A few hours ago, a new and improved version (2.4) of
1411 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">the VLC
1412 bittorrent plugin</a> was uploaded to Debian.  This new version
1413 include a complete rewrite of the bittorrent related code, which seem
1414 to make the plugin non-blocking.  This mean you can actually exit VLC
1415 even when the plugin seem to be unable to get the bittorrent streaming
1416 started.  The new version also include support for filtering playlist
1417 by file extension using command line options, if you want to avoid
1418 processing audio, video or images.  The package is currently in Debian
1419 unstable, but should be available in Debian testing in two days.  To
1420 test it, simply install it like this:</p>
1421
1422 <p><pre>
1423 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
1424 </pre></p>
1425
1426 <p>After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file
1427 downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
1428
1429 <p><pre>
1430 vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent
1431 </pre></p>
1432
1433 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1434 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1435 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1436
1437       </div>
1438       <div class="tags">
1439
1440
1441         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>.
1442
1443
1444       </div>
1445     </div>
1446     <div class="padding"></div>
1447
1448     <div class="entry">
1449       <div class="title">
1450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_site_not_using_Content_Security_Policy___CSP_.html">Why is your site not using Content Security Policy / CSP?</a>
1451       </div>
1452       <div class="date">
1453          9th December 2018
1454       </div>
1455       <div class="body">
1456         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching on Frikanalen the OWASP
1457 talk by Scott Helme titled
1458 "<a href="https://frikanalen.no/video/626080/">What We’ve Learned From
1459 Billions of Security Reports</a>".  I had not heard of the
1460 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy">Content
1461 Security Policy standard</a> nor its ability to "call home" when a
1462 browser detect a policy breach (I do not follow web page design
1463 development much these days), and found the talk very illuminating.</p>
1464
1465 <p>The mechanism allow a web site owner to use HTTP headers to tell
1466 visitors web browser which sources (internal and external) are allowed to
1467 be used on the web site.  Thus it become possible to enforce a "only
1468 local content" policy despite web designers urge to fetch programs
1469 from random sites on the Internet, like the one
1470 <a href="https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/68966/hacking/browsealoud-plugin-hack.html">enabling
1471 the attack</a> reported by Scott Helme earlier this year.</p>
1472
1473 <p>Using CSP seem like an obvious thing for a site admin to implement
1474 to take some control over the information leak that occur when
1475 external sources are used to render web pages, it is a mystery more
1476 sites are not using CSP?  It is being
1477 <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP/">standardized under W3C</a> these
1478 days, and is supposed by most web browsers</p>
1479
1480 <p>I managed to find <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/django-csp">a
1481 Django middleware for implementing CSP</a> and was happy to discover
1482 it was already in Debian.  I plan to use it to add CSP support to the
1483 Frikanalen web site soon.</p>
1484
1485 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1486 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1487 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1488
1489       </div>
1490       <div class="tags">
1491
1492
1493         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1494
1495
1496       </div>
1497     </div>
1498     <div class="padding"></div>
1499
1500     <div class="entry">
1501       <div class="title">
1502         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_and_improved_Frikanalen_Kodi_addon_version_0_0_3.html">New and improved Frikanalen Kodi addon version 0.0.3</a>
1503       </div>
1504       <div class="date">
1505          8th November 2018
1506       </div>
1507       <div class="body">
1508         <p>If you read my blog regularly, you probably know I am involved in
1509 running and developing the <a href="https://frikanalen.no/">Norwegian
1510 TV channel Frikanalen</a>.  It is an open channel, allowing everyone
1511 in Norway to publish videos on a TV channel with national coverage.
1512 You can think of it as Youtube for national television.
1513 In addition to distribution on RiksTV and Uninett, Frikanalen is also
1514 available as a Kodi addon.  The last few days I have updated the code
1515 to add more features.  A
1516 <a href="https://kodi.tv/addon/plugins-video-add-ons/frikanalen-nett-tv">new
1517 and improved version 0.0.3 Frikanalen addon</a> was just made
1518 available via the Kodi repositories.  This new version include a
1519 option to browse videos by category, as well as free text search
1520 in the video archive.  It will now also show the video duration in the
1521 video lists, which were missing earlier.  A new and experimental
1522 link to the HD video stream currently being worked on is provided, for
1523 those that want to see what the <a href="https://casparcg.com/">CasparCG</a>
1524 output look like.  The alternative is the SD video stream, generated
1525 using MLT.  CasparCG is controlled by our
1526 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/mltplayout/">mltplayout
1527 server</a> which instead of talking to mlt is giving PLAY instructions
1528 to the CasparCG server when it is time to start a new program.</p>
1529
1530 <p>By now, you are probably wondering what kind of content is being
1531 played on the channel.  These days, it is filled with technical
1532 presentations like those from <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>,
1533 <a href="https://www.debconf.org/">Debconf</a>, Makercon, and TED,
1534 but there are also some periods with
1535 <a href="https://www.empo.no/">EMPT TV</a> and
1536 <a href="https://www.p7.no/">P7</a>.
1537
1538 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1539 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1540 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1541
1542       </div>
1543       <div class="tags">
1544
1545
1546         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1547
1548
1549       </div>
1550     </div>
1551     <div class="padding"></div>
1552
1553     <div class="entry">
1554       <div class="title">
1555         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
1556       </div>
1557       <div class="date">
1558          1st November 2018
1559       </div>
1560       <div class="body">
1561         <p>As part of my involvement in
1562 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
1563 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
1564 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
1565 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
1566 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
1567 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
1568 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
1569 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
1570 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
1571 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
1572 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
1573 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
1574 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
1575 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
1576 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
1577 everywhere.</p>
1578
1579 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
1580 up the topic on
1581 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
1582 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
1583 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
1584 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
1585 to join the discussion?</p>
1586
1587 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1588 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1589 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1590
1591       </div>
1592       <div class="tags">
1593
1594
1595         Tags: <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/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1596
1597
1598       </div>
1599     </div>
1600     <div class="padding"></div>
1601
1602     <div class="entry">
1603       <div class="title">
1604         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_the_speaker_frequency_response_using_the_AUDMES_free_software_GUI___nice_free_software.html">Measuring the speaker frequency response using the AUDMES free software GUI - nice free software</a>
1605       </div>
1606       <div class="date">
1607         22nd October 2018
1608       </div>
1609       <div class="body">
1610         <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-10-22-audmes-measure-speakers.png" align="right" width="40%"/></p>
1611
1612 <p>My current home stereo is a patchwork of various pieces I got on
1613 flee markeds over the years.  It is amazing what kind of equipment
1614 show up there.  I've been wondering for a while if it was possible to
1615 measure how well this equipment is working together, and decided to
1616 see how far I could get using free software.  After trawling the web I
1617 came across an article from DIY Audio and Video on
1618 <a href="https://www.diyaudioandvideo.com/Tutorial/SpeakerResponseTesting/">Speaker
1619 Testing and Analysis</a> describing how to test speakers, and it listing
1620 several software options, among them
1621 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/audmes/">AUDio MEasurement
1622 System (AUDMES)</a>.  It is the only free software system I could find
1623 focusing on measuring speakers and audio frequency response.  In the
1624 process I also found an interesting article from NOVO on
1625 <a href="http://novo.press/understanding-speaker-specifications-and-frequency-response/">Understanding
1626 Speaker Specifications and Frequency Response</a> and an article from
1627 ecoustics on
1628 <a href="https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/understanding-speaker-frequency-response/">Understanding
1629 Speaker Frequency Response</a>, with a lot of information on what to
1630 look for and how to interpret the graphs.  Armed with this knowledge,
1631 I set out to measure the state of my speakers.</p>
1632
1633 <p>The first hurdle was that AUDMES hadn't seen a commit for 10 years
1634 and did not build with current compilers and libraries.  I got in
1635 touch with its author, who no longer was spending time on the program
1636 but gave me write access to the subversion repository on Sourceforge.
1637 The end result is that now the code build on Linux and is capable of
1638 saving and loading the collected frequency response data in CSV
1639 format.  The application is quite nice and flexible, and I was able to
1640 select the input and output audio interfaces independently.  This made
1641 it possible to use a USB mixer as the input source, while sending
1642 output via my laptop headphone connection.  I lacked the hardware and
1643 cabling to figure out a different way to get independent cabling to
1644 speakers and microphone.</p>
1645
1646 <p>Using this setup I could see how a large range of high frequencies
1647 apparently were not making it out of my speakers.  The picture show
1648 the frequency response measurement of one of the speakers.  Note the
1649 frequency lines seem to be slightly misaligned, compared to the CSV
1650 output from the program.  I can not hear several of these are high
1651 frequencies, according to measurement from
1652 <a href="http://freehearingtestsoftware.com">Free Hearing Test
1653 Software</a>, an freeware system to measure your hearing (still
1654 looking for a free software alternative), so I do not know if they are
1655 coming out out the speakers.  I thus do not quite know how to figure
1656 out if the missing frequencies is a problem with the microphone, the
1657 amplifier or the speakers, but I managed to rule out the audio card in my
1658 PC by measuring my Bose noise canceling headset using its own
1659 microphone.  This setup was able to see the high frequency tones, so
1660 the problem with my stereo had to be in the amplifier or speakers.</p>
1661
1662 <p>Anyway, to try to role out one factor I ended up picking up a new
1663 set of speakers at a flee marked, and these work a lot better than the
1664 old speakers, so I guess the microphone and amplifier is OK.  If you
1665 need to measure your own speakers, check out AUDMES.  If more people
1666 get involved, perhaps the project could become good enough to
1667 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/910876">include in Debian</a>?  And if
1668 you know of some other free software to measure speakers and amplifier
1669 performance, please let me know.  I am aware of the freeware option
1670 <a href="https://www.roomeqwizard.com/">REW</a>, but I want something
1671 that can be developed also when the vendor looses interest.</p>
1672
1673 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1674 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1675 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1676
1677       </div>
1678       <div class="tags">
1679
1680
1681         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>.
1682
1683
1684       </div>
1685     </div>
1686     <div class="padding"></div>
1687
1688     <div class="entry">
1689       <div class="title">
1690         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_browser_integration_of_VLC_with_Bittorrent_support.html">Web browser integration of VLC with Bittorrent support</a>
1691       </div>
1692       <div class="date">
1693         21st October 2018
1694       </div>
1695       <div class="body">
1696         <p>Bittorrent is as far as I know, currently the most efficient way to
1697 distribute content on the Internet.  It is used all by all sorts of
1698 content providers, from national TV stations like
1699 <a href="https://www.nrk.no/">NRK</a>, Linux distributors like
1700 <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> and
1701 <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>, and of course the
1702 <a href="https://archive.org/">Internet archive</A>.
1703
1704 <p>Almost a month ago
1705 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">a new
1706 package adding Bittorrent support to VLC</a> became available in
1707 Debian testing and unstable.  To test it, simply install it like
1708 this:</p>
1709
1710 <p><pre>
1711 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
1712 </pre></p>
1713
1714 <p>Since the plugin was made available for the first time in Debian,
1715 several improvements have been made to it.  In version 2.2-4, now
1716 available in both testing and unstable, a desktop file is provided to
1717 teach browsers to start VLC when the user click on torrent files or
1718 magnet links.  The last part is thanks to me finally understanding
1719 what the strange x-scheme-handler style MIME types in desktop files
1720 are used for.  By adding x-scheme-handler/magnet to the MimeType entry
1721 in the desktop file, at least the browsers Firefox and Chromium will
1722 suggest to start VLC when selecting a magnet URI on a web page.  The
1723 end result is that now, with the plugin installed in Buster and Sid,
1724 one can visit any
1725 <a href="https://archive.org/details/CopyingIsNotTheft1080p">Internet
1726 Archive page with movies</a> using a web browser and click on the
1727 torrent link to start streaming the movie.</p>
1728
1729 <p>Note, there is still some misfeatures in the plugin.  One is the
1730 fact that it will hang and
1731 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/13">block VLC
1732 from exiting until the torrent streaming starts</a>.  Another is the
1733 fact that it
1734 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/9">will pick
1735 and play a random file in a multi file torrent</a>.  This is not
1736 always the video file you want.  Combined with the first it can be a
1737 bit hard to get the video streaming going.  But when it work, it seem
1738 to do a good job.</p>
1739
1740 <p>For the Debian packaging, I would love to find a good way to test
1741 if the plugin work with VLC using autopkgtest.  I tried, but do not
1742 know enough of the inner workings of VLC to get it working.  For now
1743 the autopkgtest script is only checking if the .so file was
1744 successfully loaded by VLC.  If you have any suggestions, please
1745 submit a patch to the Debian bug tracking system.</p>
1746
1747 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1748 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1749 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1750
1751       </div>
1752       <div class="tags">
1753
1754
1755         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>.
1756
1757
1758       </div>
1759     </div>
1760     <div class="padding"></div>
1761
1762     <div class="entry">
1763       <div class="title">
1764         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_2_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.2 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
1765       </div>
1766       <div class="date">
1767         18th October 2018
1768       </div>
1769       <div class="body">
1770         <p>This morning, the new release of the
1771 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
1772 Noark 5 core project</a> was
1773 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2018-October/000406.html">announced
1774 on the project mailing list</a>.  The free software solution is an
1775 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by
1776 government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in version 0.2
1777 since version 0.1.1 (from NEWS.md):
1778
1779 <ul>
1780   <li>Fix typos in REL names</li>
1781   <li>Tidy up error message reporting</li>
1782   <li>Fix issue where we used Integer.valueOf(), not Integer.getInteger()</li>
1783   <li>Change some String handling to StringBuffer</li>
1784   <li>Fix error reporting</li>
1785   <li>Code tidy-up</li>
1786   <li>Fix issue using static non-synchronized SimpleDateFormat to avoid
1787       race conditions</li>
1788   <li>Fix problem where deserialisers were treating integers as strings</li>
1789   <li>Update methods to make them null-safe</li>
1790   <li>Fix many issues reported by coverity</li>
1791   <li>Improve equals(), compareTo() and hash() in domain model</li>
1792   <li>Improvements to the domain model for metadata classes</li>
1793   <li>Fix CORS issues when downloading document</li>
1794   <li>Implementation of case-handling with registryEntry and document upload</li>
1795   <li>Better support in Javascript for OPTIONS</li>
1796   <li>Adding concept description of mail integration</li>
1797   <li>Improve setting of default values for GET on ny-journalpost</li>
1798   <li>Better handling of required values during deserialisation </li>
1799   <li>Changed tilknyttetDato (M620) from date to dateTime</li>
1800   <li>Corrected some opprettetDato (M600) (de)serialisation errors.</li>
1801   <li>Improve parse error reporting.</li>
1802   <li>Started on OData search and filtering.</li>
1803   <li>Added Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct to project.</li>
1804   <li>Moved repository and project from Github to Gitlab.</li>
1805   <li>Restructured repository, moved code into src/ and web/.</li>
1806   <li>Updated code to use Spring Boot version 2.</li>
1807   <li>Added support for OAuth2 authentication.</li>
1808   <li>Fixed several bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
1809   <li>Corrected handling of date/datetime fields.</li>
1810   <li>Improved error reporting when rejecting during deserializatoin.</li>
1811   <li>Adjusted default values provided for ny-arkivdel, ny-mappe,
1812    ny-saksmappe, ny-journalpost and ny-dokumentbeskrivelse.</li>
1813   <li>Several fixes for korrespondansepart*.</li>
1814   <li>Updated web GUI:
1815      <ul>
1816        <li>Now handle both file upload and download.</li>
1817        <li>Uses new OAuth2 authentication for login.</li>
1818        <li>Forms now fetches default values from API using GET.</li>
1819        <li>Added RFC 822 (email), TIFF and JPEG to list of possible file formats.</li>
1820      </ul></li>
1821 </ul>
1822
1823 <p>The changes and improvements are extensive.  Running diffstat on
1824 the changes between git tab 0.1.1 and 0.2 show 1098 files changed,
1825 108666 insertions(+), 54066 deletions(-).</p>
1826
1827 <p>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
1828 you, please contact us on IRC
1829 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
1830 irc.freenode.net</a>) or email
1831 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
1832 mailing list</a>).</p>
1833
1834 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1835 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1836 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1837
1838       </div>
1839       <div class="tags">
1840
1841
1842         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
1843
1844
1845       </div>
1846     </div>
1847     <div class="padding"></div>
1848
1849     <div class="entry">
1850       <div class="title">
1851         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fetching_trusted_timestamps_using_the_rfc3161ng_python_module.html">Fetching trusted timestamps using the rfc3161ng python module</a>
1852       </div>
1853       <div class="date">
1854          8th October 2018
1855       </div>
1856       <div class="body">
1857         <p>I have  earlier covered the basics of trusted timestamping using the
1858 'openssl ts' client.  See blog post for
1859 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">2014</a>,
1860 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">2016</a>
1861 and
1862 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">2017</a>
1863 for those stories.  But some times I want to integrate the timestamping
1864 in other code, and recently I needed to integrate it into Python.
1865 After searching a bit, I found
1866 <a href="https://dev.entrouvert.org/projects/python-rfc3161">the
1867 rfc3161 library</a> which seemed like a good fit, but I soon
1868 discovered it only worked for python version 2, and I needed something
1869 that work with python version 3.  Luckily I next came across
1870 <a href="https://github.com/trbs/rfc3161ng/">the rfc3161ng library</a>,
1871 a fork of the original rfc3161 library.  Not only is it working with
1872 python 3, it have fixed a few of the bugs in the original library, and
1873 it has an active maintainer.  I decided to wrap it up and make it
1874 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-rfc3161ng">available in
1875 Debian</a>, and a few days ago it entered Debian unstable and testing.</p>
1876
1877 <p>Using the library is fairly straight forward.  The only slightly
1878 problematic step is to fetch the required certificates to verify the
1879 timestamp.  For some services it is straight forward, while for others
1880 I have not yet figured out how to do it.  Here is a small standalone
1881 code example based on of the integration tests in the library code:</p>
1882
1883 <pre>
1884 #!/usr/bin/python3
1885
1886 """
1887
1888 Python 3 script demonstrating how to use the rfc3161ng module to
1889 get trusted timestamps.
1890
1891 The license of this code is the same as the license of the rfc3161ng
1892 library, ie MIT/BSD.
1893
1894 """
1895
1896 import os
1897 import pyasn1.codec.der
1898 import rfc3161ng
1899 import subprocess
1900 import tempfile
1901 import urllib.request
1902
1903 def store(f, data):
1904     f.write(data)
1905     f.flush()
1906     f.seek(0)
1907
1908 def fetch(url, f=None):
1909     response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
1910     data = response.read()
1911     if f:
1912         store(f, data)
1913     return data
1914
1915 def main():
1916     with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as cert_f,\
1917          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as ca_f,\
1918          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as msg_f,\
1919          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as tsr_f:
1920
1921         # First fetch certificates used by service
1922         certificate_data = fetch('https://freetsa.org/files/tsa.crt', cert_f)
1923         ca_data_data = fetch('https://freetsa.org/files/cacert.pem', ca_f)
1924
1925         # Then timestamp the message
1926         timestamper = \
1927             rfc3161ng.RemoteTimestamper('http://freetsa.org/tsr',
1928                                         certificate=certificate_data)
1929         data = b"Python forever!\n"
1930         tsr = timestamper(data=data, return_tsr=True)
1931
1932         # Finally, convert message and response to something 'openssl ts' can verify
1933         store(msg_f, data)
1934         store(tsr_f, pyasn1.codec.der.encoder.encode(tsr))
1935         args = ["openssl", "ts", "-verify",
1936                 "-data", msg_f.name,
1937                 "-in", tsr_f.name,
1938                 "-CAfile", ca_f.name,
1939                 "-untrusted", cert_f.name]
1940         subprocess.check_call(args)
1941
1942 if '__main__' == __name__:
1943    main()
1944 </pre>
1945
1946 <p>The code fetches the required certificates, store them as temporary
1947 files, timestamp a simple message, store the message and timestamp to
1948 disk and ask 'openssl ts' to verify the timestamp.  A timestamp is
1949 around 1.5 kiB in size, and should be fairly easy to store for future
1950 use.</p>
1951
1952 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1953 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1954 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1955
1956       </div>
1957       <div class="tags">
1958
1959
1960         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1961
1962
1963       </div>
1964     </div>
1965     <div class="padding"></div>
1966
1967     <div class="entry">
1968       <div class="title">
1969         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
1970       </div>
1971       <div class="date">
1972          4th October 2018
1973       </div>
1974       <div class="body">
1975         <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
1976 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
1977 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
1978 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
1979 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
1980 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
1981 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
1982 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
1983
1984 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
1985 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
1986 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
1987 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
1988
1989 <p><blockquote><pre>
1990 [Desktop Entry]
1991 Name=Google drive autosync
1992 Type=Application
1993 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
1994 </pre></blockquote></p>
1995
1996 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
1997 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
1998
1999 <p><blockquote><pre>
2000 #!/bin/sh
2001 set -e
2002 cd ~/
2003 cleanup() {
2004     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
2005         kill $syncpid
2006     fi
2007 }
2008 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
2009 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
2010 syncpdi=$!
2011 while true; do
2012     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
2013         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
2014         exit 1
2015     fi
2016     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
2017         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
2018     fi
2019     sleep 300
2020 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
2021 </pre></blockquote></p>
2022
2023 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
2024 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
2025 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
2026
2027 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2028 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2029 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2030
2031       </div>
2032       <div class="tags">
2033
2034
2035         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2036
2037
2038       </div>
2039     </div>
2040     <div class="padding"></div>
2041
2042     <div class="entry">
2043       <div class="title">
2044         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Valutakrambod___A_python_and_bitcoin_love_story.html">Valutakrambod - A python and bitcoin love story</a>
2045       </div>
2046       <div class="date">
2047         29th September 2018
2048       </div>
2049       <div class="body">
2050         <p>It would come as no surprise to anyone that I am interested in
2051 bitcoins and virtual currencies.  I've been keeping an eye on virtual
2052 currencies for many years, and it is part of the reason a few months
2053 ago, I started writing a python library for collecting currency
2054 exchange rates and trade on virtual currency exchanges.  I decided to
2055 name the end result valutakrambod, which perhaps can be translated to
2056 small currency shop.</p>
2057
2058 <p>The library uses the tornado python library to handle HTTP and
2059 websocket connections, and provide a asynchronous system for
2060 connecting to and tracking several services.  The code is available
2061 from
2062 <a href="http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod">github</a>.</p>
2063
2064 </p>There are two example clients of the library.  One is very simple and
2065 list every updated buy/sell price received from the various services.
2066 This code is started by running bin/btc-rates and call the client code
2067 in valutakrambod/client.py.  The simple client look like this:</p>
2068
2069 <p><blockquote><pre>
2070 import functools
2071 import tornado.ioloop
2072 import valutakrambod
2073 class SimpleClient(object):
2074     def __init__(self):
2075         self.services = []
2076         self.streams = []
2077         pass
2078     def newdata(self, service, pair, changed):
2079         print("%-15s %s-%s: %8.3f %8.3f" % (
2080             service.servicename(),
2081             pair[0],
2082             pair[1],
2083             service.rates[pair]['ask'],
2084             service.rates[pair]['bid'])
2085         )
2086     async def refresh(self, service):
2087         await service.fetchRates(service.wantedpairs)
2088     def run(self):
2089         self.ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current()
2090         self.services = valutakrambod.service.knownServices()
2091         for e in self.services:
2092             service = e()
2093             service.subscribe(self.newdata)
2094             stream = service.websocket()
2095             if stream:
2096                 self.streams.append(stream)
2097             else:
2098                 # Fetch information from non-streaming services immediately
2099                 self.ioloop.call_later(len(self.services),
2100                                        functools.partial(self.refresh, service))
2101                 # as well as regularly
2102                 service.periodicUpdate(60)
2103         for stream in self.streams:
2104             stream.connect()
2105         try:
2106             self.ioloop.start()
2107         except KeyboardInterrupt:
2108             print("Interrupted by keyboard, closing all connections.")
2109             pass
2110         for stream in self.streams:
2111             stream.close()
2112 </pre></blockquote></p>
2113
2114 <p>The library client loops over all known "public" services,
2115 initialises it, subscribes to any updates from the service, checks and
2116 activates websocket streaming if the service provide it, and if no
2117 streaming is supported, fetches information from the service and sets
2118 up a periodic update every 60 seconds.  The output from this client
2119 can look like this:</p>
2120
2121 <p><blockquote><pre>
2122 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
2123 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
2124 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
2125 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.560 6593.690
2126 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.560 6593.690
2127 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
2128 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.570 6593.690
2129 Bitstamp        EUR-USD:    1.159    1.154
2130 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.570 6593.690
2131 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
2132 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
2133 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
2134 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
2135 Paymium         BTC-EUR: 5680.000 5620.240
2136 </pre></blockquote></p>
2137
2138 <p>The exchange order book is tracked in addition to the best buy/sell
2139 price, for those that need to know the details.</p>
2140
2141 <p>The other example client is focusing on providing a curses view
2142 with updated buy/sell prices as soon as they are received from the
2143 services.  This code is located in bin/btc-rates-curses and activated
2144 by using the '-c' argument.  Without the argument the "curses" output
2145 is printed without using curses, which is useful for debugging.  The
2146 curses view look like this:</p>
2147
2148 <p><blockquote><pre>
2149            Name Pair   Bid         Ask         Spr    Ftcd    Age
2150  BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR   5591.8400   5711.0800   2.1%   16    nan     60
2151        Bitfinex BTCEUR   5671.0000   5671.2000   0.0%   16     22     59
2152         Bitmynt BTCEUR   5580.8000   5807.5200   3.9%   16     41     60
2153          Bitpay BTCEUR   5663.2700         nan   nan%   15    nan     60
2154        Bitstamp BTCEUR   5664.8400   5676.5300   0.2%    0      1      1
2155            Bl3p BTCEUR   5653.6900   5684.9400   0.5%    0    nan     19
2156        Coinbase BTCEUR   5600.8200   5714.9000   2.0%   15    nan    nan
2157          Kraken BTCEUR   5670.1000   5670.2000   0.0%   14     17     60
2158         Paymium BTCEUR   5620.0600   5680.0000   1.1%    1   7515    nan
2159  BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK  52898.9700  54034.6100   2.1%   16    nan     60
2160         Bitmynt BTCNOK  52960.3200  54031.1900   2.0%   16     41     60
2161          Bitpay BTCNOK  53477.7833         nan   nan%   16    nan     60
2162        Coinbase BTCNOK  52990.3500  54063.0600   2.0%   15    nan    nan
2163         MiraiEx BTCNOK  52856.5300  54100.6000   2.3%   16    nan    nan
2164  BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD   6495.5300   6631.5400   2.1%   16    nan     60
2165        Bitfinex BTCUSD   6590.6000   6590.7000   0.0%   16     23     57
2166          Bitpay BTCUSD   6564.1300         nan   nan%   15    nan     60
2167        Bitstamp BTCUSD   6561.1400   6565.6200   0.1%    0      2      1
2168        Coinbase BTCUSD   6504.0600   6635.9700   2.0%   14    nan    117
2169          Gemini BTCUSD   6567.1300   6573.0700   0.1%   16     89    nan
2170          Hitbtc+BTCUSD   6592.6200   6594.2100   0.0%    0      0      0
2171          Kraken BTCUSD   6565.2000   6570.9000   0.1%   15     17     58
2172   Exchangerates EURNOK      9.4665      9.4665   0.0%   16 107789    nan
2173      Norgesbank EURNOK      9.4665      9.4665   0.0%   16 107789    nan
2174        Bitstamp EURUSD      1.1537      1.1593   0.5%    4      5      1
2175   Exchangerates EURUSD      1.1576      1.1576   0.0%   16 107789    nan
2176  BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR      1.0000     49.0000  98.0%   16    nan    nan
2177  BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK    492.4800    503.7500   2.2%   16    nan     60
2178  BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD      1.0221     49.0000  97.9%   15    nan    nan
2179      Norgesbank USDNOK      8.1777      8.1777   0.0%   16 107789    nan
2180 </pre></blockquote></p>
2181
2182 <p>The code for this client is too complex for a simple blog post, so
2183 you will have to check out the git repository to figure out how it
2184 work.  What I can tell is how the three last numbers on each line
2185 should be interpreted.  The first is how many seconds ago information
2186 was received from the service.  The second is how long ago, according
2187 to the service, the provided information was updated.  The last is an
2188 estimate on how often the buy/sell values change.</p>
2189
2190 <p>If you find this library useful, or would like to improve it, I
2191 would love to hear from you.  Note that for some of the services I've
2192 implemented a trading API.  It might be the topic of a future blog
2193 post.</p>
2194
2195 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2196 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2197 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2198
2199       </div>
2200       <div class="tags">
2201
2202
2203         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>.
2204
2205
2206       </div>
2207     </div>
2208     <div class="padding"></div>
2209
2210     <div class="entry">
2211       <div class="title">
2212         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/VLC_in_Debian_now_can_do_bittorrent_streaming.html">VLC in Debian now can do bittorrent streaming</a>
2213       </div>
2214       <div class="date">
2215         24th September 2018
2216       </div>
2217       <div class="body">
2218         <p>Back in February, I got curious to see
2219 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">if
2220 VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming</a>.  It did not, despite the
2221 fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating
2222 around for years.  I did however find
2223 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">a standalone plugin
2224 for VLC</a> to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the
2225 plugin and get it into Debian.  I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago,
2226 and am very happy to report that it
2227 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">entered
2228 Debian</a> a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable
2229 tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.</p>
2230
2231 <p>With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able
2232 to stream videos using a simple call to</p>
2233
2234 <p><blockquote><pre>
2235 vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent
2236 </pre></blockquote></p>
2237
2238 </p>It can handle magnet links too.  Now if only native vlc had
2239 bittorrent support.  Then a lot more would be helping each other to
2240 share public domain and creative commons movies.  The plugin need some
2241 stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent
2242 with many files, but is already usable.  Please note that the plugin
2243 is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill
2244 up your disk if you are not careful.  Have fun. :)</p>
2245
2246 <p>I would love to get help maintaining this package.  Get in touch if
2247 you are interested.</p>
2248
2249 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2250 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2251 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2252
2253       </div>
2254       <div class="tags">
2255
2256
2257         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>.
2258
2259
2260       </div>
2261     </div>
2262     <div class="padding"></div>
2263
2264     <div class="entry">
2265       <div class="title">
2266         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
2267       </div>
2268       <div class="date">
2269          2nd September 2018
2270       </div>
2271       <div class="body">
2272         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
2273 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
2274 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
2275 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
2276 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
2277 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
2278 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
2279
2280 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2281   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
2282   "params": {"item": { "file":
2283   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
2284   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
2285
2286 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
2287 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
2288 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
2289 Chromecast. :)</p>
2290
2291 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2292 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2293 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2294
2295       </div>
2296       <div class="tags">
2297
2298
2299         Tags: <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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2300
2301
2302       </div>
2303     </div>
2304     <div class="padding"></div>
2305
2306     <div class="entry">
2307       <div class="title">
2308         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_created_using_taxpayers__money_should_be_Free_Software.html">Software created using taxpayers’ money should be Free Software</a>
2309       </div>
2310       <div class="date">
2311         30th August 2018
2312       </div>
2313       <div class="body">
2314         <p>It might seem obvious that software created using tax money should
2315 be available for everyone to use and improve.  Free Software
2316 Foundation Europe recentlystarted a campaign to help get more people
2317 to understand this, and I just signed the petition on
2318 <a href="https://publiccode.eu/">Public Money, Public Code</a> to help
2319 them. I hope you too will do the same.</p>
2320
2321       </div>
2322       <div class="tags">
2323
2324
2325         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>.
2326
2327
2328       </div>
2329     </div>
2330     <div class="padding"></div>
2331
2332     <div class="entry">
2333       <div class="title">
2334         <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>
2335       </div>
2336       <div class="date">
2337         13th August 2018
2338       </div>
2339       <div class="body">
2340         <p>A few days ago, I wondered if there are any privacy respecting
2341 health monitors and/or fitness trackers available for sale these days.
2342 I would like to buy one, but do not want to share my personal data
2343 with strangers, nor be forced to have a mobile phone to get data out
2344 of the unit.  I've received some ideas, and would like to share them
2345 with you.
2346
2347 One interesting data point was a pointer to a Free Software app for
2348 Android named
2349 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/">Gadgetbridge</a>.
2350 It provide cloudless collection and storing of data from a variety of
2351 trackers.  Its
2352 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/#supported-devices">list
2353 of supported devices</a> is a good indicator for units where the
2354 protocol is fairly open, as it is obviously being handled by Free
2355 Software.  Other units are reportedly encrypting the collected
2356 information with their own public key, making sure only the vendor
2357 cloud service is able to extract data from the unit.  The people
2358 contacting me about Gadgetbirde said they were using
2359 <a href="https://us.amazfit.com/shop/bip?variant=336750">Amazfit
2360 Bip</a> and
2361 <a href="http://www.xiaomimi6phone.com/xiaomi-mi-band-3-features-release-date-rumors/">Xiaomi
2362 Band 3</a>.</p>
2363
2364 <p>I also got a suggestion to look at some of the units from Garmin.
2365 I was told their GPS watches can be connected via USB and show up as a
2366 USB storage device with
2367 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-development/fmt_garmin_fit.html">Garmin
2368 FIT files</a> containing the collected measurements.  While
2369 proprietary, FIT files apparently can be read at least by
2370 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org">GPSBabel</a> and the
2371 <a href="https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/gpxpod">GpxPod</a> Nextcloud
2372 app.  It is unclear to me if they can read step count and heart rate
2373 data.  The person I talked to was using a
2374 <a href="https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/564291">Garmin Forerunner
2375 935</a>, which is a fairly expensive unit.  I doubt it is worth it for
2376 a unit where the vendor clearly is trying its best to move from open
2377 to closed systems.  I still remember when Garmin dropped NMEA support
2378 in its GPSes.</p>
2379
2380 <p>A final idea was to build ones own unit, perhaps by basing it on a
2381 wearable hardware platforms like
2382 <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/flora-geo-watch">the Flora Geo
2383 Watch</a>.  Sound like fun, but I had more money than time to spend on
2384 the topic, so I suspect it will have to wait for another time.</p>
2385
2386 <p>While I was working on tracking down links, I came across an
2387 inspiring TED talk by Dave Debronkart about
2388 <a href="https://archive.org/details/DavedeBronkart_2010X">being a
2389 e-patient</a>, and discovered the web site
2390 <a href="https://participatorymedicine.org/epatients/">Participatory
2391 Medicine</a>.  If you too want to track your own health and fitness
2392 without having information about your private life floating around on
2393 computers owned by others, I recommend checking it out.</p>
2394
2395 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2396 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2397 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2398
2399       </div>
2400       <div class="tags">
2401
2402
2403         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2404
2405
2406       </div>
2407     </div>
2408     <div class="padding"></div>
2409
2410     <div class="entry">
2411       <div class="title">
2412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker_.html">Privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker?</a>
2413       </div>
2414       <div class="date">
2415          7th August 2018
2416       </div>
2417       <div class="body">
2418         <p>Dear lazyweb,</p>
2419
2420 <p>I wonder, is there a fitness tracker / health monitor available for
2421 sale today that respect the users privacy?  With this I mean a
2422 watch/bracelet capable of measuring pulse rate and other
2423 fitness/health related values (and by all means, also the correct time
2424 and location if possible), which is <strong>only</strong> provided for
2425 me to extract/read from the unit with computer without a radio beacon
2426 and Internet connection.  In other words, it do not depend on a cell
2427 phone app, and do make the measurements available via other peoples
2428 computer (aka "the cloud").  The collected data should be available
2429 using only free software.  I'm not interested in depending on some
2430 non-free software that will leave me high and dry some time in the
2431 future.  I've been unable to find any such unit.  I would like to buy
2432 it.  The ones I have seen for sale here in Norway are proud to report
2433 that they share my health data with strangers (aka "cloud enabled").
2434 Is there an alternative?  I'm not interested in giving money to people
2435 requiring me to accept "privacy terms" to allow myself to measure my
2436 own health.</p>
2437
2438 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2439 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2440 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2441
2442       </div>
2443       <div class="tags">
2444
2445
2446         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2447
2448
2449       </div>
2450     </div>
2451     <div class="padding"></div>
2452
2453     <div class="entry">
2454       <div class="title">
2455         <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>
2456       </div>
2457       <div class="date">
2458         31st July 2018
2459       </div>
2460       <div class="body">
2461         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
2462 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
2463 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
2464 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
2465 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
2466 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
2467 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
2468 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
2469 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
2470 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
2471 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
2472 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
2473 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
2474
2475 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
2476 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
2477 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
2478 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
2479 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
2480 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
2481 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
2482 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
2483 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
2484 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
2485 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
2486 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
2487 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
2488
2489 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
2490 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
2491 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
2492 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
2493 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
2494 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
2495 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
2496 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
2497 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
2498 seem to have the support I need.</p>
2499
2500 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
2501 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
2502 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
2503 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
2504
2505 <blockquote><pre>
2506 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
2507   -description='The RSS image description.' \
2508   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
2509 </pre></blockquote>
2510
2511 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
2512 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
2513 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
2514 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
2515 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
2516
2517 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
2518 suggestions.</p>
2519
2520 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2521 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2522 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2523
2524       </div>
2525       <div class="tags">
2526
2527
2528         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2529
2530
2531       </div>
2532     </div>
2533     <div class="padding"></div>
2534
2535     <div class="entry">
2536       <div class="title">
2537         <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>
2538       </div>
2539       <div class="date">
2540         12th July 2018
2541       </div>
2542       <div class="body">
2543         <p>Last night, I wrote
2544 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
2545 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
2546 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
2547 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
2548 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
2549 care of it all.</p>
2550
2551 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
2552 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
2553 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
2554 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
2555 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
2556 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
2557 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
2558 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
2559 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
2560 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
2561 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
2562 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
2563 I only care about the picture part.</p>
2564
2565 <blockquote><pre>
2566 #!/bin/sh
2567 #
2568 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
2569 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
2570 # for backgorund information.
2571
2572 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
2573 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
2574 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
2575 kodicmd() {
2576     host="$1"
2577     cmd="$2"
2578     params="$3"
2579     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2580          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
2581          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
2582 }
2583 cleanup() {
2584     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
2585         # Stop the playing when we end
2586         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
2587                             jq .result[].playerid)
2588         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
2589     fi
2590     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
2591         kill "$gstpid"
2592     fi
2593 }
2594 trap cleanup EXIT INT
2595
2596 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
2597     kodihost=$1
2598     shift
2599 else
2600     kodihost=kodi.local
2601 fi
2602
2603 mcast=239.255.0.1
2604 mcastport=1234
2605 mcastttl=1
2606
2607 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
2608   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
2609 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2610   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2611   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2612   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2613   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2614   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2615   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
2616   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
2617 gstpid=$!
2618
2619 # Give stream a second to get going
2620 sleep 1
2621
2622 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
2623 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
2624         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
2625
2626 # wait for gst to end
2627 wait "$gstpid"
2628 </pre></blockquote>
2629
2630 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
2631
2632 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2633 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2634 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2635
2636       </div>
2637       <div class="tags">
2638
2639
2640         Tags: <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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2641
2642
2643       </div>
2644     </div>
2645     <div class="padding"></div>
2646
2647     <div class="entry">
2648       <div class="title">
2649         <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>
2650       </div>
2651       <div class="date">
2652         12th July 2018
2653       </div>
2654       <div class="body">
2655         <p>PS: See
2656 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
2657 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
2658
2659 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
2660 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
2661 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
2662 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
2663 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
2664 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
2665
2666 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
2667 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
2668 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
2669 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
2670 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
2671 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
2672
2673 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
2674 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
2675 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
2676 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
2677 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
2678 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
2679
2680 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
2681 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
2682 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
2683 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
2684 the programs I work on.</p>
2685
2686 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
2687 rtp and rtsp recipes from
2688 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
2689 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
2690 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
2691
2692 <blockquote><pre>
2693 vlc screen:// --sout \
2694   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
2695 </pre></blockquote>
2696
2697 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
2698 same IP address:</p>
2699
2700 <blockquote><pre>
2701 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
2702   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2703 </pre></blockquote>
2704
2705 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
2706 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
2707 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
2708 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
2709 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
2710 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
2711 big screen. :)</p>
2712
2713 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
2714 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
2715 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
2716 enough to tell.</p>
2717
2718 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
2719 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
2720 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
2721 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
2722 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
2723 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
2724 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
2725 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
2726 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
2727 the source end
2728
2729 <blockquote><pre>
2730 cvlc screen:// --sout \
2731   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
2732 </pre></blockquote>
2733
2734 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2735
2736 <blockquote><pre>
2737 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
2738   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2739 </pre></blockquote>
2740
2741 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
2742 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
2743 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
2744 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
2745 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
2746 difference.</p>
2747
2748 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
2749 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
2750 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
2751 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
2752 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
2753 multicast address on port 1234:
2754
2755 <blockquote><pre>
2756 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2757   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2758   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2759   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2760   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2761   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2762   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
2763     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
2764   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
2765 </pre></blockquote>
2766
2767 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2768
2769 <blockquote><pre>
2770 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
2771   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2772 </pre></blockquote>
2773
2774 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
2775 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
2776 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
2777 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
2778 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
2779 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
2780 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
2781
2782 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
2783 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
2784 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
2785 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
2786
2787 <blockquote><pre>
2788 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
2789 </pre></blockquote>
2790
2791 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2792 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2793 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2794
2795       </div>
2796       <div class="tags">
2797
2798
2799         Tags: <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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2800
2801
2802       </div>
2803     </div>
2804     <div class="padding"></div>
2805
2806     <div class="entry">
2807       <div class="title">
2808         <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>
2809       </div>
2810       <div class="date">
2811          9th July 2018
2812       </div>
2813       <div class="body">
2814         <p>Five years ago,
2815 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
2816 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
2817 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
2818 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
2819 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
2820 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
2821 unstable only this time:
2822
2823 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
2824
2825 <pre>
2826   count MIME type
2827   ----- -----------------------
2828      56 image/jpeg
2829      55 image/png
2830      49 image/tiff
2831      48 image/gif
2832      39 image/bmp
2833      38 text/plain
2834      37 audio/mpeg
2835      34 application/ogg
2836      33 audio/x-flac
2837      32 audio/x-mp3
2838      30 audio/x-wav
2839      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
2840      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
2841      27 inode/directory
2842      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
2843      27 audio/x-mpeg
2844      26 application/x-ogg
2845      25 audio/x-mpegurl
2846      25 audio/ogg
2847      24 text/html
2848 </pre>
2849
2850 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
2851 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
2852 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
2853
2854 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
2855 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
2856 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
2857 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
2858 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
2859 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
2860 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
2861 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
2862 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
2863 list like this:</p>
2864
2865 <p><blockquote><pre>
2866 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
2867 Package: anjuta
2868 Package: audacious
2869 Package: baobab
2870 Package: cervisia
2871 Package: chirp
2872 Package: dolphin
2873 Package: doublecmd-common
2874 Package: easytag
2875 Package: enlightenment
2876 Package: ephoto
2877 Package: filelight
2878 Package: gwenview
2879 Package: k4dirstat
2880 Package: kaffeine
2881 Package: kdesvn
2882 Package: kid3
2883 Package: kid3-qt
2884 Package: nautilus
2885 Package: nemo
2886 Package: pcmanfm
2887 Package: pcmanfm-qt
2888 Package: qweborf
2889 Package: ranger
2890 Package: sirikali
2891 Package: spacefm
2892 Package: spacefm
2893 Package: vifm
2894 %
2895 </pre></blockquote></p>
2896
2897 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
2898 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
2899
2900 <p><blockquote><pre>
2901 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
2902 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
2903 %
2904 </pre></blockquote></p>
2905
2906 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
2907 format:</p>
2908
2909 <p><blockquote><pre>
2910 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
2911 Package: cura
2912 Package: meshlab
2913 Package: printrun
2914 %
2915 </pre></blockquote></p>
2916
2917 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
2918
2919 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2920 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2921 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2922
2923       </div>
2924       <div class="tags">
2925
2926
2927         Tags: <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>.
2928
2929
2930       </div>
2931     </div>
2932     <div class="padding"></div>
2933
2934     <div class="entry">
2935       <div class="title">
2936         <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>
2937       </div>
2938       <div class="date">
2939          8th July 2018
2940       </div>
2941       <div class="body">
2942         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
2943 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
2944 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
2945 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
2946 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
2947 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
2948 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
2949 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
2950 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
2951 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
2952 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
2953
2954 <p><blockquote><pre>
2955 #!/bin/sh
2956 #
2957 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
2958 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
2959 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
2960 # flag for manual/automatic.
2961
2962 set -e
2963
2964 ignore() {
2965     if [ "$1" ]; then
2966         grep -v "$1"
2967     else
2968         cat
2969     fi
2970 }
2971
2972 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
2973     echo "Upgrading $p"
2974     apt clean
2975     apt install --download-only -y $p
2976     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
2977         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
2978             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
2979             break
2980         fi
2981     done
2982 done
2983 </pre></blockquote></p>
2984
2985 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
2986 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
2987 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
2988 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
2989 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
2990 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
2991 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
2992 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
2993 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
2994
2995 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
2996 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
2997 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
2998 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
2999 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
3000
3001 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
3002 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
3003 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
3004 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
3005 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
3006 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
3007 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
3008
3009 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3010 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3011 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3012
3013       </div>
3014       <div class="tags">
3015
3016
3017         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3018
3019
3020       </div>
3021     </div>
3022     <div class="padding"></div>
3023
3024     <div class="entry">
3025       <div class="title">
3026         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_worlds_only_stone_power_plant_.html">The worlds only stone power plant?</a>
3027       </div>
3028       <div class="date">
3029         30th June 2018
3030       </div>
3031       <div class="body">
3032         <p>So far, at least hydro-electric power, coal power, wind power,
3033 solar power, and wood power are well known.  Until a few days ago, I
3034 had never heard of stone power.  Then I learn about a quarry in a
3035 mountain in
3036 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremanger">Bremanger</a> i
3037 Norway, where
3038 <a href="https://www.bontrup.com/en/activities/raw-materials/bremanger-quarry/">the
3039 Bremanger Quarry</a> company is extracting stone and dumping the stone
3040 into a shaft leading to its shipping harbour.  This downward movement
3041 in this shaft is used to produce electricity.  In short, it is using
3042 falling rocks instead of falling water to produce electricity, and
3043 according to its own statements it is producing more power than it is
3044 using, and selling the surplus electricity to the Norwegian power
3045 grid.  I find the concept truly amazing.  Is this the worlds only
3046 stone power plant?</p>
3047
3048 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3049 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3050 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3051
3052       </div>
3053       <div class="tags">
3054
3055
3056         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3057
3058
3059       </div>
3060     </div>
3061     <div class="padding"></div>
3062
3063     <div class="entry">
3064       <div class="title">
3065         <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>
3066       </div>
3067       <div class="date">
3068         26th June 2018
3069       </div>
3070       <div class="body">
3071         <p>My movie playing setup involve <a href="https://kodi.tv/">Kodi</a>,
3072 <a href="https://openelec.tv">OpenELEC</a> (probably soon to be
3073 replaced with <a href="https://libreelec.tv/">LibreELEC</a>) and an
3074 Infocus IN76 video projector.  My projector can be controlled via both
3075 a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line.  The vendor of
3076 my projector, <a href="https://www.infocus.com/">InFocus</a>, had been
3077 sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
3078 it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
3079 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/infocus-projector-control">a
3080 small script to control the projector</a>.  For a while now, I longed
3081 for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
3082 such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
3083 turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
3084 on again.</p>
3085
3086 <p>A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
3087 managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
3088 got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
3089 Add-on with support for several projectors.  To my pleasure, he was
3090 positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
3091 add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
3092 repository.</p>
3093
3094 <p>The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
3095 adjustments.  The most important change I do relative to the master
3096 branch in the github repository is embedding the
3097 <a href="https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial">pyserial module</a> in
3098 the add-on.  The long term solution is to make a "script" type
3099 pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
3100 Kodi.  But until that in place, I embed it.</p>
3101
3102 <p>The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
3103 starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
3104 screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops.  It can also be
3105 told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
3106
3107 <p>If this sound interesting to you, check out
3108 <a href="https://github.com/fredrik-eriksson/kodi_projcontrol">the
3109 project github repository</a>.  Perhaps you can send patches to
3110 support your projector too?  As soon as we find time to wrap up the
3111 latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
3112 Kodi instance.</p>
3113
3114 <p>For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
3115 detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
3116 projector from within Kodi.  We also need to figure out how to handle
3117 the cooling period of the projector.  My projector refuses to turn on
3118 for 60 seconds after it was turned off.  This is not handled well by
3119 the add-on at the moment.</p>
3120
3121 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3122 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3123 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3124
3125       </div>
3126       <div class="tags">
3127
3128
3129         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>.
3130
3131
3132       </div>
3133     </div>
3134     <div class="padding"></div>
3135
3136     <div class="entry">
3137       <div class="title">
3138         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Self_appointed_leaders_of_the_Free_World.html">Self-appointed leaders of the Free World</a>
3139       </div>
3140       <div class="date">
3141         22nd March 2018
3142       </div>
3143       <div class="body">
3144         <p>The leaders of the worlds have started to congratulate the
3145 re-elected Russian head of state, and this causes some criticism.  I
3146 am though a little fascinated by a comment from USA senator John McCain,
3147 <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/379339-mccain-rips-trumps-congratulatory-call-to-putin-as-insult-to-russian-people">sited
3148 by The Hill and others</a>:
3149
3150 <p><blockquote>
3151 <p>"An American president does not lead the Free World by
3152 congratulating dictators on winning sham elections."</p>
3153 </blockquote></p>
3154
3155 <p>While I totally agree with the senator here, the way the quote is
3156 phrased make me suspect that he is unaware of the simple fact that USA
3157 have not lead the Free World since at least before its government
3158 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar">kidnapped a
3159 completely innocent Canadian citizen in transit on his way home to
3160 Canada via John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 and
3161 sent him to be tortured in Syria for a year</a>.</p>
3162
3163 <p>USA might be running ahead, but the path they are taking is not the
3164 one taken by any Free World.</p>
3165
3166       </div>
3167       <div class="tags">
3168
3169
3170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3171
3172
3173       </div>
3174     </div>
3175     <div class="padding"></div>
3176
3177     <div class="entry">
3178       <div class="title">
3179         <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>
3180       </div>
3181       <div class="date">
3182         21st March 2018
3183       </div>
3184       <div class="body">
3185         <p>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
3186 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
3187 mostly in the USA.  What I find a bit surprising, is how little
3188 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
3189 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place.  And what about the
3190 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
3191 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
3192 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
3193 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
3194 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
3195 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.</p>
3196
3197 <p>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
3198 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
3199 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed.  It is well known that
3200 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
3201 nevertheless.  Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
3202 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
3203 information about the millions of Facebook users.  Collected
3204 information will be misused sooner or later.  The only way to avoid
3205 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place.  If
3206 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
3207 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
3208 information.</p>
3209
3210 <p>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
3211 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
3212 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely">According
3213 to The Guardian</a>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
3214 account removal (and not just 'disabling').  You need to
3215 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=faq_content">visit
3216 a specific Facebook page</a> and click on 'let us know' on that page
3217 to get to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account">the
3218 real account deletion screen</a>.  Perhaps something to consider?  I
3219 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
3220 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
3221 exposure a bit.</p>
3222
3223 <p>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
3224 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
3225 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to <a href="">NUUG</a> last april about
3226 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20170404-big-data-psychometric/">
3227 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
3228 politics</a>.</p>
3229
3230 <p>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
3231 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
3232 <a href="https://www.signal.org/">Signal</a> or
3233 <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>, and stop sharing your private
3234 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.</p>
3235
3236       </div>
3237       <div class="tags">
3238
3239
3240         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>.
3241
3242
3243       </div>
3244     </div>
3245     <div class="padding"></div>
3246
3247     <div class="entry">
3248       <div class="title">
3249         <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>
3250       </div>
3251       <div class="date">
3252         13th March 2018
3253       </div>
3254       <div class="body">
3255         <p>I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative
3256 Commons.  This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories
3257 from those around the globe making a living using Creative
3258 Commons.</p>
3259
3260 <p>Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer
3261 translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book
3262 <a href="https://madewith.cc">Made with Creative Commons from 2017</a>
3263 was complete.  The Spanish translation is also complete, while the
3264 Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work.  Get in
3265 touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to
3266 translate into your mother tongue.</p>
3267
3268 <p>The whole book project started when
3269 <a href="http://gwolf.org/node/4102">Gunnar Wolf announced</a> that he
3270 was going to make a Spanish edition of the book.  I noticed, and
3271 offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with
3272 translating the
3273 <a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Free
3274 Culture</a> and
3275 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">The Debian
3276 Administrator's Handbook</a> books to Norwegian Bokmål.  To make a
3277 long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the
3278 first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of
3279 Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself.  The first
3280 proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof
3281 reading remains.  We will also need to translate the 14 figures and
3282 create a book cover.  Once it is done we will publish the book on
3283 paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.</p>
3284
3285 <p>The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is
3286 downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc.
3287 The Markdown is modified by a script before is converted to DocBook
3288 using pandoc.  The DocBook is modified again using a script before it
3289 is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators.  The translated
3290 PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to
3291 create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to
3292 create the final PDF.  The end result is a set of editions of the
3293 manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.</p>
3294
3295 <p>The translation is conducted using
3296 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/">the
3297 Weblate web based translation system</a>.  Please have a look there
3298 and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof
3299 reading. :)</p>
3300
3301 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3302 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3303 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3304
3305       </div>
3306       <div class="tags">
3307
3308
3309         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>.
3310
3311
3312       </div>
3313     </div>
3314     <div class="padding"></div>
3315
3316     <div class="entry">
3317       <div class="title">
3318         <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>
3319       </div>
3320       <div class="date">
3321          2nd March 2018
3322       </div>
3323       <div class="body">
3324         <p>Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of
3325 choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations.
3326 While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the
3327 info screen booting with some text scrolling.  I was not quick enough
3328 with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot
3329 screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a
3330 corrupt file system:
3331
3332 <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>
3333
3334 <p>While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the
3335 content on the screen worries me.</p>
3336
3337 <p>The image show the version booting is 'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid',
3338 indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid
3339 after Debian Etch (version 4) was released 2007-04-08 and before
3340 Debian Lenny (version 5) was released 2009-02-14.  Since Lenny Debian
3341 has released version 6 (Squeeze) 2011-02-06, 7 (Wheezy) 2013-05-04, 8
3342 (Jessie) 2015-04-25 and 9 (Stretch) 2017-06-15, according to
3343 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history">a Debian
3344 version history on Wikpedia</a>.  This mean the system is running
3345 around 10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for
3346 many years.</p>
3347
3348 <p>This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company,
3349 Ruter, running outdated software.  In 2012,
3350 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Er_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_uten_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_.html">I
3351 discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows 2000</a>,
3352 and this was
3353 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fortsatt_ingen_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_for_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_.html">still
3354 the case in 2016</a>.  Given the response from the responsible people
3355 in 2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched
3356 Windows 2000.  Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.</p>
3357
3358 <p>The photo is made available under the license terms
3359 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons
3360 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY 4.0)</a>.</p>
3361
3362 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3363 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3364 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3365
3366       </div>
3367       <div class="tags">
3368
3369
3370         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>.
3371
3372
3373       </div>
3374     </div>
3375     <div class="padding"></div>
3376
3377     <div class="entry">
3378       <div class="title">
3379         <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>
3380       </div>
3381       <div class="date">
3382         18th February 2018
3383       </div>
3384       <div class="body">
3385         <p>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
3386 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
3387 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
3388 <a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit">The upstream
3389 project still exist</a>, though, and up until today, the upstream
3390 source was available from Savannah via subversion.  I am happy to
3391 report that this just changed.</p>
3392
3393 <p>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
3394 repositories:</p>
3395
3396 <ul>
3397
3398 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git">sysvinit</a></li>
3399 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git">insserv</a></li>
3400 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git">startpar</a></li>
3401
3402 </ul>
3403
3404 <p>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
3405 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
3406 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.</p>
3407
3408 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3409 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3410 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3411
3412       </div>
3413       <div class="tags">
3414
3415
3416         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>.
3417
3418
3419       </div>
3420     </div>
3421     <div class="padding"></div>
3422
3423     <div class="entry">
3424       <div class="title">
3425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources</a>
3426       </div>
3427       <div class="date">
3428         14th February 2018
3429       </div>
3430       <div class="body">
3431         <p>A few days ago, a new major version of
3432 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a> was announced, and I
3433 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
3434 <a href="http://bittorrent.org/">bittorrent</a> and
3435 <a href="https://webtorrent.io">webtorrent</a>.  Bittorrent is one of
3436 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
3437 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
3438 <a href="https://webrtc.org">WebRTC</a> as its transport channel,
3439 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
3440 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
3441 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
3442 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
3443 Looking at
3444 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html">the release
3445 notes</a> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
3446 the web.  I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
3447 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
3448 ("<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-130211/">Open
3449 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support</a>"), about a
3450 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
3451 support.  To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
3452 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
3453 feature request tickets tracking such feature.  I got an answer from
3454 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
3455 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was.  So I searched a bit
3456 more, and came across an independent
3457 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">VLC plugin to add
3458 bittorrent support</a>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
3459 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
3460 about.</p>
3461
3462 <p>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
3463 the git repository, with some modifications.  After installing this
3464 package, I could stream videos from
3465 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> using VLC
3466 commands like this:</p>
3467
3468 <p><blockquote><pre>
3469 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
3470 </pre></blockquote></p>
3471
3472 <p>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
3473 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
3474 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it.  It can take
3475 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
3476 what is going on from VLC.  It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
3477 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
3478 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line.  I
3479 have no idea why.</p>
3480
3481 <p>I have created a <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/890360">request for
3482 a new package in Debian (RFP)</a> and
3483 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/1">asked if
3484 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen</a>.  Now we
3485 wait to see what come out of this.  I do not want to maintain a
3486 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
3487 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this.  But I
3488 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
3489 still maintaining the source.  If you want to help, please update the
3490 RFP request or the upstream issue.</p>
3491
3492 <p>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.</p>
3493
3494 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3495 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3496 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3497
3498       </div>
3499       <div class="tags">
3500
3501
3502         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>.
3503
3504
3505       </div>
3506     </div>
3507     <div class="padding"></div>
3508
3509     <div class="entry">
3510       <div class="title">
3511         <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>
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="date">
3514         13th February 2018
3515       </div>
3516       <div class="body">
3517         <p>A new version of the
3518 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
3519 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
3520 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
3521 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
3522 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
3523 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
3524 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
3525 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
3526 well.</p>
3527
3528 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
3529 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
3530 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
3531 in Debian.</p>
3532
3533 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3534 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3535 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3536
3537       </div>
3538       <div class="tags">
3539
3540
3541         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>.
3542
3543
3544       </div>
3545     </div>
3546     <div class="padding"></div>
3547
3548     <div class="entry">
3549       <div class="title">
3550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html">How hard can æ, ø and å be?</a>
3551       </div>
3552       <div class="date">
3553         11th February 2018
3554       </div>
3555       <div class="body">
3556         <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-02-11-peppes-unicode.jpeg" align="right"/>
3557
3558 <p>We write 2018, and it is 30 years since Unicode was introduced.
3559 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
3560 just work with any computer system.  But it is apparently beyond reach
3561 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant.  Recently I visited
3562 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
3563 Notice how 'ø' and 'å' are replaced with strange symbols in
3564 'Servitør', 'Å BETALE', 'Beløp pr. gjest', 'Takk for besøket.' and 'Vi
3565 gleder oss til å se deg igjen'.</p>
3566
3567 <p>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.</p>
3568
3569 <p>I removed personal and private information to be nice.</p>
3570
3571 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3572 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3573 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3574
3575       </div>
3576       <div class="tags">
3577
3578
3579         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3580
3581
3582       </div>
3583     </div>
3584     <div class="padding"></div>
3585
3586     <div class="entry">
3587       <div class="title">
3588         <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>
3589       </div>
3590       <div class="date">
3591          7th January 2018
3592       </div>
3593       <div class="body">
3594         <p>I've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
3595 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than 11,000 title IDs
3596 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far.  Most of them (57%) are
3597 feature films from USA published before 1923.  I've also tracked down
3598 more than 24,000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
3599 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher.  According to the front
3600 web page for <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film
3601 Vault</A>, there are 44,000 public domain films, so I guess there are
3602 still some left to identify.</p>
3603
3604 <p>The complete data set is available from
3605 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
3606 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.
3607 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
3608 "product catalog" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
3609 but any source I find believable is used.  I've so far had to throw
3610 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
3611 the movies listed.</p>
3612
3613 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
3614 far:</p>
3615
3616 <p><pre>
3617  2352 entries (   66 unique) with and 15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
3618  2302 entries (  120 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
3619   195 entries (   63 unique) with and   200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
3620    89 entries (   52 unique) with and    38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
3621   344 entries (   28 unique) with and   655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
3622   668 entries (  209 unique) with and  1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
3623   830 entries (   21 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
3624    19 entries (   19 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
3625  6822 entries ( 6669 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
3626   137 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
3627  1205 entries (   57 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
3628    84 entries (   20 unique) with and   167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
3629   158 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
3630   113 entries (    4 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
3631   182 entries (  100 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
3632   229 entries (   87 unique) with and     1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
3633    44 entries (    2 unique) with and    64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
3634   291 entries (   33 unique) with and   474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
3635   211 entries (    7 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
3636  1232 entries (   57 unique) with and  1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
3637    46 entries (   13 unique) with and    81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
3638   698 entries (   64 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
3639  1758 entries (  882 unique) with and  3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
3640    16 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
3641    63 entries (   16 unique) with and   141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
3642 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 8724 only in one list, 24647 without IMDB title ID
3643 </pre></p>
3644
3645 <p> I keep finding more data sources.  I found the cinemovies source
3646 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
3647 my list with 63 movies.  Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
3648 repository if you are curious how the lists are created.  Many of the
3649 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
3650 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
3651 if the year matches.  This allow me to automatically use many lists of
3652 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
3653 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain.  So far my
3654 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
3655 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
3656 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID.  It would make the job of
3657 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.</p>
3658
3659 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3660 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3661 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3662
3663       </div>
3664       <div class="tags">
3665
3666
3667         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>.
3668
3669
3670       </div>
3671     </div>
3672     <div class="padding"></div>
3673
3674     <div class="entry">
3675       <div class="title">
3676         <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>
3677       </div>
3678       <div class="date">
3679         17th December 2017
3680       </div>
3681       <div class="body">
3682         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
3683 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
3684 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
3685 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
3686 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
3687 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
3688 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
3689 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
3690 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
3691 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
3692 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
3693 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
3694 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
3695
3696 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
3697 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
3698 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
3699 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
3700 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
3701
3702 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
3703 team, flocking together on the
3704 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
3705 mailing list and the
3706 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
3707 IRC channel.</p>
3708
3709 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
3710 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
3711 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
3712
3713       </div>
3714       <div class="tags">
3715
3716
3717         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>.
3718
3719
3720       </div>
3721     </div>
3722     <div class="padding"></div>
3723
3724     <div class="entry">
3725       <div class="title">
3726         <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>
3727       </div>
3728       <div class="date">
3729         13th December 2017
3730       </div>
3731       <div class="body">
3732         <p>While looking at
3733 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
3734 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
3735 an idea occurred to me.  The number of renewals are so few per year, it
3736 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
3737 the corresponding IMDB title ID.  This would give the (presumably)
3738 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
3739 enter the public domain for the transcribed year.  By fetching the
3740 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
3741 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
3742 are now in the public domain.  For the year 1955 (which is the one I
3743 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
3744 21.  For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
3745 500-600 pages.  It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
3746 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
3747 time.</p>
3748
3749 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
3750 listed for 1955):</p>
3751
3752 <p><blockquote>
3753   ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
3754   Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
3755   10Jun55; R151558.
3756 </blockquote></p>
3757
3758 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
3759 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
3760 DDmmmYY).  The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
3761 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found.  I am not
3762 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
3763 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
3764
3765 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
3766 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
3767 movie title using for example
3768 <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>.
3769 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
3770 first renewal entry from 1955 is
3771 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
3772
3773 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
3774 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
3775 down IMDB title IDs.  In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
3776 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
3777 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
3778 away.  By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
3779 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
3780 be able to discover any typos introduced.  But I will need help to
3781 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
3782 own.  If you would like to help, please get in touch.  Perhaps you can
3783 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
3784
3785 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
3786 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
3787 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
3788 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
3789 have copies of renewal for written works.  I have not been able to find
3790 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far.  Perhaps they exist
3791 somewhere?</p>
3792
3793 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
3794 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder.  At least
3795 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
3796 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
3797 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
3798 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
3799 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
3800
3801 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3802 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3803 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3804
3805       </div>
3806       <div class="tags">
3807
3808
3809         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>.
3810
3811
3812       </div>
3813     </div>
3814     <div class="padding"></div>
3815
3816     <div class="entry">
3817       <div class="title">
3818         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
3819       </div>
3820       <div class="date">
3821          5th December 2017
3822       </div>
3823       <div class="body">
3824         <p>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
3825 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks">Empty Socks from
3826 1927</a>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library.  At the
3827 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
3828 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
3829 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html">my
3830 reasoning to conclude</a> that it would would enter the Norwegian
3831 equivalent of the public domain in 2053, based on my understanding of
3832 Norwegian Copyright Law.  But a few days ago, I came across
3833 <a href="http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham.4792291/">a
3834 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain</a>, at
3835 least in USA.  The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
3836 November or Desember 1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
3837 registered its copyright that year.  At that time, right holders of
3838 movies registered by the copyright office received government
3839 protection for there work for 28 years.  After 28 years, the copyright
3840 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
3841 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
3842 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in 1956.  Yet someone
3843 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
3844 protected.  Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
3845 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
3846 entries.  Ser.3 pt.12-13 v.9-12 1955-1958 Motion Pictures
3847 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1955r.html#film">available
3848 from the University of Pennsylvania</a>, neither in
3849 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=83;num=45">page
3850 45 for the first half of 1955</a>, nor in
3851 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=175;num=119">page
3852 119 for the second half of 1955</a>.  It is of course possible that
3853 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake.  Is
3854 there some way to rule out this possibility?  Please help, and update
3855 the wikipedia page with your findings.
3856
3857 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3858 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3859 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3860
3861       </div>
3862       <div class="tags">
3863
3864
3865         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>.
3866
3867
3868       </div>
3869     </div>
3870     <div class="padding"></div>
3871
3872     <div class="entry">
3873       <div class="title">
3874         <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>
3875       </div>
3876       <div class="date">
3877         28th November 2017
3878       </div>
3879       <div class="body">
3880         <p>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
3881 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">the Internet Archive</a>, if the
3882 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate.  In the
3883 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
3884 love letter to the future.  The metadata in the Internet Archive could
3885 use a face lift for the future to love us back.  Here is a proposal
3886 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
3887 today.  I've been unable to find any document describing the various
3888 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
3889 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
3890 of the existing movies.</p>
3891
3892 <p>I have a few use cases in mind.  First of all, I would like to be
3893 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
3894 without duplicates.  I would further like to identify the IMDB title
3895 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
3896 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
3897 with my friends.</p>
3898
3899 <p>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
3900 archive
3901 (<a href="https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive">available
3902 from github</a>), to list as many of the good movies as possible.  The
3903 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
3904 parameters:</p>
3905
3906 <p><pre>
3907 collection:moviesandfilms
3908 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
3909 AND -mediatype:collection
3910 AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
3911 AND year
3912 </pre></p>
3913
3914 <p>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
3915 because the 'year' field is missing.  The 'year' field is populated by
3916 the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
3917 released (date or year).  Two such examples are
3918 <a href="https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905">Ben Hur
3919 from 1905</a> and
3920 <a href="https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama">Caminandes
3921 2: Gran Dillama from 2013</a>, where the year metadata field is
3922 missing.</p>
3923
3924 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
3925 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
3926 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
3927 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
3928
3929 <dl>
3930
3931 <dt>mediatype</dt>
3932 <dd>Should be 'movie' for movies.</dd>
3933
3934 <dt>collection</dt>
3935 <dd>Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.</dd>
3936
3937 <dt>title</dt>
3938 <dd>The title of the movie, without the publication year.</dd>
3939
3940 <dt>date</dt>
3941 <dd>The data or year the movie was released.  This make the movie show
3942 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
3943 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.</dd>
3944
3945 <dt>director</dt>
3946 <dd>The director of the movie.  This make it easier to know if the
3947 correct movie is found in movie databases.</dd>
3948
3949 <dt>publisher</dt>
3950 <dd>The production company making the movie.  Also useful for
3951 identifying the correct movie.</dd>
3952
3953 <dt>links</dt>
3954
3955 <dd>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: &lt;a
3956 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/"&gt;Movie in
3957 IMDB&lt;/a&gt;.  This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
3958 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive.  Other external
3959 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.</dd>
3960
3961 </dl>
3962
3963 <p>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
3964 example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
3965 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.</p>
3966
3967 <p>I created
3968 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
3969 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
3970 Archive</a>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
3971 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates).  It would be great if
3972 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
3973 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
3974 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
3975 while before this happen.  If you have uploaded movies into the
3976 Internet Archive, you can help.  Please consider following my proposal
3977 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
3978 counted. :)</p>
3979
3980 <p>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
3981 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
3982 the Internet Archive.  But there are lots of movies without a
3983 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
3984 (like for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes">the
3985 Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
3986 one Wikidata entry).</p>
3987
3988 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3989 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3990 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3991
3992       </div>
3993       <div class="tags">
3994
3995
3996         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>.
3997
3998
3999       </div>
4000     </div>
4001     <div class="padding"></div>
4002
4003     <div class="entry">
4004       <div class="title">
4005         <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>
4006       </div>
4007       <div class="date">
4008         18th November 2017
4009       </div>
4010       <div class="body">
4011         <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
4012 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
4013 check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
4014 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
4015 Internet.  I have continued to look for good data sources, and
4016 identified a few more.  The code used to extract information from
4017 various data sources is available in
4018 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
4019 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
4020
4021 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs.  To gain
4022 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
4023 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
4024 year).  It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
4025 graph are located.  I wonder why they are placed there.  I suspect
4026 World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
4027 around 2010?</p>
4028
4029 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
4030
4031 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
4032 the public domain or with a free license.  This is the statistics
4033 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
4034
4035 <pre>
4036   249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
4037  2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
4038   830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
4039  2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
4040   291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
4041   144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
4042   350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
4043     4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
4044   698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
4045     8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
4046  3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
4047 </pre>
4048
4049 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
4050 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
4051 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
4052 movies that lack a IMDB title ID.  I've seen examples of all these
4053 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID.  Based
4054 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
4055 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
4056
4057 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
4058 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata.  I have
4059 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
4060 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far.  Perhaps you
4061 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
4062 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
4063 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
4064
4065 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
4066 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet.  If such page
4067 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
4068 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
4069 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
4070
4071 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4072 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4073 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4074
4075       </div>
4076       <div class="tags">
4077
4078
4079         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>.
4080
4081
4082       </div>
4083     </div>
4084     <div class="padding"></div>
4085
4086     <div class="entry">
4087       <div class="title">
4088         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
4089       </div>
4090       <div class="date">
4091          1st November 2017
4092       </div>
4093       <div class="body">
4094         <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
4095 find these articles and papers interesting.  They have formed how I
4096 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
4097
4098 <ul>
4099
4100 <li>USENIX :login; <a
4101 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
4102 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance.  Analysis of Distributed Storage
4103 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
4104 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
4105 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
4106
4107 <li>ZDNet
4108 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
4109 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
4110
4111 <li>ZDNet
4112 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
4113 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
4114
4115 <li>USENIX FAST'07
4116 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
4117 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
4118 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
4119
4120 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
4121 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
4122 Integrity.  Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
4123 Hughes</li>
4124
4125 <li>USENIX FAST'08
4126 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
4127 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
4128 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
4129 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
4130
4131 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
4132 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
4133 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
4134 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
4135
4136 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
4137 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
4138 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?  A Comprehensive
4139 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
4140 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
4141
4142 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
4143 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
4144 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
4145 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
4146
4147 </ul>
4148
4149 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
4150 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
4151 opening.  The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
4152 redundant storage systems.  Details matter.  And unfortunately there
4153 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues.  Both
4154 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
4155 practical issues on their own.  I wonder how cluster file systems like
4156 Ceph do in this regard.  After all, there is an old saying, you know
4157 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
4158 never heard of stops you from getting any work done.  The same holds
4159 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
4160
4161 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
4162 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
4163 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
4164
4165 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4166 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4167 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4168
4169       </div>
4170       <div class="tags">
4171
4172
4173         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>.
4174
4175
4176       </div>
4177     </div>
4178     <div class="padding"></div>
4179
4180     <div class="entry">
4181       <div class="title">
4182         <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>
4183       </div>
4184       <div class="date">
4185         31st October 2017
4186       </div>
4187       <div class="body">
4188         <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
4189 know there are easily available web services available for writing
4190 LaTeX documents as a team.  I thought it was common knowledge, but to
4191 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
4192 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents.  Some of them even
4193 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
4194
4195 <p>There are two commercial services available,
4196 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
4197 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>.  They are very easy to
4198 use.  Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
4199 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing.  Note, these two
4200 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
4201 one joint service.  I've used both for different documents, and they
4202 work just fine.  While
4203 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
4204 software</a>, while the latter is not.  According to <a
4205 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
4206 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
4207 base maintained as free software.</p>
4208
4209 But these two are not the only alternatives.
4210 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
4211 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
4212 source available on github</a>.  I have not used it myself.  Several
4213 others can be found on the nice
4214 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
4215 web service</a>.
4216
4217 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
4218 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services.  You can even
4219 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
4220
4221 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4222 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4223 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4224
4225       </div>
4226       <div class="tags">
4227
4228
4229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4230
4231
4232       </div>
4233     </div>
4234     <div class="padding"></div>
4235
4236     <div class="entry">
4237       <div class="title">
4238         <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>
4239       </div>
4240       <div class="date">
4241         25th October 2017
4242       </div>
4243       <div class="body">
4244         <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
4245 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
4246 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
4247 to can be freely distributed on the Internet.  This proved to be
4248 harder than it sounds.  IMDB for sure list movies without any
4249 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
4250 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
4251 Creative Commons.  These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
4252 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
4253 the information in IMDB.</p>
4254
4255 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
4256 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
4257 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
4258 feel how to do this.  It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
4259 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
4260 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie.  As I needed to check
4261 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable.  I simply
4262 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
4263 set.</p>
4264
4265 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
4266 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
4267 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
4268 metadata.  Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
4269 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
4270 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
4271
4272 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
4273 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
4274 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
4275 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
4276 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID.  This is useful based on the
4277 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
4278 legally distributed on the Internet.  With some help from the RDF
4279 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
4280 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
4281 Wikidata</a>:
4282
4283 <p><pre>
4284 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
4285 WHERE
4286 {
4287   ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
4288   ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
4289   ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
4290   OPTIONAL {
4291         ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
4292         ?work rdfs:label ?label.
4293         FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
4294   }
4295 }
4296 </pre></p>
4297
4298 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
4299 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
4300 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
4301 of the latter two are available.  At the moment the result set contain
4302 2338 entries.  Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
4303 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
4304 for the movie.  It should be noted that the result will include
4305 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages.  There are
4306 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
4307 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
4308 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
4309 automatically.</p>
4310
4311 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
4312 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
4313 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
4314 free movies and their IMDB ID.  In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
4315 the refered Internet Archive entry.  I assume the 70 "disappearing"
4316 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
4317
4318 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
4319 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
4320 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
4321 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
4322 on Wikipedia.</p>
4323
4324 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
4325 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
4326 years:<p>
4327
4328 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
4329
4330 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
4331 be similar.</p>
4332
4333 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
4334 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
4335 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
4336 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
4337
4338 <p><pre>
4339 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
4340 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
4341 </pre></p>
4342
4343 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
4344 introduce a typo.</p>
4345
4346 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
4347 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
4348 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
4349 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
4350 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
4351 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
4352 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
4353 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
4354 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
4355 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
4356 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
4357 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
4358 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
4359 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
4360 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
4361 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
4362 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
4363 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
4364 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
4365 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
4366 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
4367 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
4368 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
4369 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
4370 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
4371 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
4372 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
4373 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
4374 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
4375 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
4376 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
4377 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
4378 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
4379 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
4380 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
4381 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
4382 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
4383 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
4384 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
4385 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
4386 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
4387 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
4388 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
4389 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
4390 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
4391 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
4392 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
4393 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
4394 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
4395 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
4396 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
4397 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
4398 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
4399 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
4400 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
4401 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
4402 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
4403 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
4404 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
4405 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
4406 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
4407 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
4408 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
4409 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
4410 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
4411 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
4412 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
4413 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
4414 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
4415 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
4416 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
4417 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
4418 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
4419 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
4420 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
4421 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
4422 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
4423 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
4424 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
4425 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
4426 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
4427 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
4428 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
4429 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
4430 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
4431 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
4432 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
4433 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
4434 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
4435 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
4436 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
4437 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
4438 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513">Q324513</a>,
4439 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172">Q374172</a>,
4440 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269">Q7533269</a>,
4441 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386">Q970386</a>,
4442 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849">Q976849</a>,
4443 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614">Q7458614</a>,
4444 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416">Q5347416</a>,
4445 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005">Q5460005</a>,
4446 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392">Q5463392</a>,
4447 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555">Q3038555</a>,
4448 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458">Q5288458</a>,
4449 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516">Q2346516</a>,
4450 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645">Q5183645</a>,
4451 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497">Q5185497</a>,
4452 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127">Q5216127</a>,
4453 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127">Q5223127</a>,
4454 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159">Q5261159</a>,
4455 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759">Q1300759</a>,
4456 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241">Q5521241</a>,
4457 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434">Q7733434</a>,
4458 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264">Q7736264</a>,
4459 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032">Q7737032</a>,
4460 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671">Q7882671</a>,
4461 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427">Q7719427</a>,
4462 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444">Q7719444</a>,
4463 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575">Q7722575</a>,
4464 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763">Q2629763</a>,
4465 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346">Q2640346</a>,
4466 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2649671">Q2649671</a>,
4467 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7703851">Q7703851</a>,
4468 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7747041">Q7747041</a>,
4469 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6544949">Q6544949</a>,
4470 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6672759">Q6672759</a>,
4471 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2445896">Q2445896</a>,
4472 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12124891">Q12124891</a>,
4473 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3127044">Q3127044</a>,
4474 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262">Q2511262</a>,
4475 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672">Q2517672</a>,
4476 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165">Q2543165</a>,
4477 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
4478 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
4479 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12126890">Q12126890</a>,
4480 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
4481 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
4482 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
4483 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
4484 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559509">Q2559509</a>,
4485 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559912">Q2559912</a>,
4486 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7760469">Q7760469</a>,
4487 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6703974">Q6703974</a>,
4488 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4744">Q4744</a>,
4489 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7766962">Q7766962</a>,
4490 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7768516">Q7768516</a>,
4491 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769205">Q7769205</a>,
4492 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769988">Q7769988</a>,
4493 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2946945">Q2946945</a>,
4494 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
4495 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
4496 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
4497 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
4498 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
4499 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6909175">Q6909175</a>,
4500 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7405709">Q7405709</a>,
4501 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149">Q7416149</a>,
4502 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952">Q7239952</a>,
4503 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332">Q7317332</a>,
4504 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674">Q7783674</a>,
4505 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704">Q7783704</a>,
4506 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590">Q7857590</a>,
4507 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372526">Q3372526</a>,
4508 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372642">Q3372642</a>,
4509 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372816">Q3372816</a>,
4510 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909">Q3372909</a>,
4511 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649">Q7959649</a>,
4512 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485">Q7977485</a>,
4513 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684">Q7992684</a>,
4514 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966">Q3817966</a>,
4515 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852">Q3821852</a>,
4516 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907">Q3420907</a>,
4517 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733">Q3429733</a>,
4518 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
4519
4520 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4521 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4522 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4523
4524       </div>
4525       <div class="tags">
4526
4527
4528         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>.
4529
4530
4531       </div>
4532     </div>
4533     <div class="padding"></div>
4534
4535     <div class="entry">
4536       <div class="title">
4537         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
4538       </div>
4539       <div class="date">
4540         14th October 2017
4541       </div>
4542       <div class="body">
4543         <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
4544 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea.  The
4545 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
4546 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
4547 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
4548 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
4549 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
4550 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
4551 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
4552
4553 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
4554 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
4555 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
4556
4557 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4558 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4559 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4560
4561       </div>
4562       <div class="tags">
4563
4564
4565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4566
4567
4568       </div>
4569     </div>
4570     <div class="padding"></div>
4571
4572     <div class="entry">
4573       <div class="title">
4574         <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>
4575       </div>
4576       <div class="date">
4577          9th October 2017
4578       </div>
4579       <div class="body">
4580         <p>At my nearby maker space,
4581 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
4582 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
4583 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
4584 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
4585 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
4586 as the software involved,
4587 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
4588 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
4589 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
4590 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
4591 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
4592 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
4593 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
4594
4595 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
4596 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
4597 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
4598 on
4599 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4600 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
4601
4602 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
4603 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
4604 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
4605 upstream version.</p>
4606
4607 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
4608 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
4609 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
4610 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
4611 Debian, check out
4612 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
4613 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
4614 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
4615
4616 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4617 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4618 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4619
4620       </div>
4621       <div class="tags">
4622
4623
4624         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>.
4625
4626
4627       </div>
4628     </div>
4629     <div class="padding"></div>
4630
4631     <div class="entry">
4632       <div class="title">
4633         <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>
4634       </div>
4635       <div class="date">
4636         29th September 2017
4637       </div>
4638       <div class="body">
4639         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
4640 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
4641 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
4642 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
4643 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
4644 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
4645 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
4646 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
4647 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
4648 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
4649 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
4650 listen.</p>
4651
4652 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
4653 visualizing this information up and running for
4654 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
4655 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
4656 library.  The solution is based on the
4657 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
4658 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
4659 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
4660 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
4661 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
4662 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
4663 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
4664 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
4665
4666 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
4667 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
4668 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
4669 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
4670 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
4671 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
4672 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
4673 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
4674
4675 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
4676 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
4677 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
4678 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
4679 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
4680 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
4681 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
4682 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
4683 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
4684 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
4685 mentioned in
4686 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
4687 issue for the topic</a>.
4688
4689 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
4690
4691       </div>
4692       <div class="tags">
4693
4694
4695         Tags: <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>.
4696
4697
4698       </div>
4699     </div>
4700     <div class="padding"></div>
4701
4702     <div class="entry">
4703       <div class="title">
4704         <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>
4705       </div>
4706       <div class="date">
4707         24th September 2017
4708       </div>
4709       <div class="body">
4710         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
4711 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
4712 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
4713 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
4714 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
4715 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
4716 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
4717 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
4718 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
4719
4720 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
4721 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
4722 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
4723 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
4724
4725 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
4726 clone of two python scripts:</p>
4727
4728 <ol>
4729
4730 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
4731   testing).</li>
4732
4733 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
4734   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
4735
4736 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
4737   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
4738
4739 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
4740
4741 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
4742   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
4743   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
4744
4745 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
4746   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
4747
4748 </ol>
4749
4750 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
4751 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
4752 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
4753 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
4754 very cheaply
4755 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
4756 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
4757 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
4758
4759 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
4760 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
4761 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
4762 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
4763 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
4764 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
4765 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
4766 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
4767
4768 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
4769 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
4770 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
4771 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
4772 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
4773 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
4774 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
4775 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
4776 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
4777 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
4778 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
4779 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
4780
4781       </div>
4782       <div class="tags">
4783
4784
4785         Tags: <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>.
4786
4787
4788       </div>
4789     </div>
4790     <div class="padding"></div>
4791
4792     <div class="entry">
4793       <div class="title">
4794         <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>
4795       </div>
4796       <div class="date">
4797          9th August 2017
4798       </div>
4799       <div class="body">
4800         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
4801 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
4802 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
4803 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
4804 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
4805 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
4806 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
4807
4808 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
4809 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
4810 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
4811 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
4812 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
4813 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
4814 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
4815 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
4816 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
4817 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
4818 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
4819 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
4820 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
4821
4822 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
4823 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
4824 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
4825 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
4826 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
4827 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
4828 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
4829 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
4830 collector for a few days now.</p>
4831
4832 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
4833
4834 <ol>
4835
4836 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
4837
4838 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
4839 <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>
4840
4841 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
4842
4843 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
4844 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
4845 found a GSM station).</li>
4846
4847 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
4848
4849 </ol>
4850
4851 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
4852 running, I decided to package
4853 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
4854 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
4855 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
4856 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
4857 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
4858
4859 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
4860 commercial tools like
4861 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
4862 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
4863 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
4864 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
4865 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
4866 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
4867 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
4868 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
4869 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
4870 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
4871 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
4872 of government officials...</p>
4873
4874 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
4875 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
4876 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
4877 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
4878 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
4879 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
4880 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
4881 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
4882 one frequency?</p>
4883
4884       </div>
4885       <div class="tags">
4886
4887
4888         Tags: <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>.
4889
4890
4891       </div>
4892     </div>
4893     <div class="padding"></div>
4894
4895     <div class="entry">
4896       <div class="title">
4897         <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>
4898       </div>
4899       <div class="date">
4900         25th July 2017
4901       </div>
4902       <div class="body">
4903         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
4904
4905 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
4906 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
4907 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
4908 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
4909 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
4910 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
4911 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
4912 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
4913 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
4914 as a web page</a>.</p>
4915
4916 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
4917 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
4918 in
4919 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
4920 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
4921 and
4922 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4923 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
4924 project.  I hope
4925 "<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
4926 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
4927
4928       </div>
4929       <div class="tags">
4930
4931
4932         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>.
4933
4934
4935       </div>
4936     </div>
4937     <div class="padding"></div>
4938
4939     <div class="entry">
4940       <div class="title">
4941         <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>
4942       </div>
4943       <div class="date">
4944         12th June 2017
4945       </div>
4946       <div class="body">
4947         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
4948 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
4949 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
4950 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
4951 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
4952 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
4953 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
4954 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
4955 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
4956 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
4957 edition is available for free from
4958 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
4959
4960 <table border="0">
4961 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
4962 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
4963
4964 <tr>
4965   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
4966   <td align="right">3</td>
4967   <td align="right">6</td>
4968   <td align="right">15</td>
4969 </tr>
4970
4971 <tr>
4972   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
4973   <td align="right">7</td>
4974   <td align="right">1</td>
4975   <td align="right">0</td>
4976 </tr>
4977
4978 <tr>
4979   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
4980   <td align="right">14</td>
4981   <td align="right">27</td>
4982   <td align="right">16</td>
4983 </tr>
4984
4985 <tr>
4986   <td>Total</td>
4987   <td align="right">24</td>
4988   <td align="right">34</td>
4989   <td align="right">31</td>
4990 </tr>
4991
4992 </table>
4993
4994 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
4995 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
4996
4997 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
4998 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
4999 touch.</p>
5000
5001       </div>
5002       <div class="tags">
5003
5004
5005         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>.
5006
5007
5008       </div>
5009     </div>
5010     <div class="padding"></div>
5011
5012     <div class="entry">
5013       <div class="title">
5014         <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>
5015       </div>
5016       <div class="date">
5017         10th June 2017
5018       </div>
5019       <div class="body">
5020         <p>I am very happy to report that the
5021 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
5022 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
5023 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
5024 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
5025 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
5026
5027 <ul>
5028
5029  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
5030  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
5031    correspondencepartInternal</li>
5032  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
5033    regualr basis.</li>
5034  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
5035  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
5036    available via URLs in _links.</li>
5037  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
5038  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
5039  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
5040  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
5041  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
5042  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
5043  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
5044  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
5045  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
5046  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
5047  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
5048  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
5049  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
5050  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
5051  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
5052    style.</li>
5053  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
5054  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
5055  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
5056  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
5057    to the official names.</li>
5058  <li>...</li>
5059
5060 </ul>
5061
5062 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
5063 on irc.freenode.net) or email
5064 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
5065 mailing list).</p>
5066
5067       </div>
5068       <div class="tags">
5069
5070
5071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
5072
5073
5074       </div>
5075     </div>
5076     <div class="padding"></div>
5077
5078     <div class="entry">
5079       <div class="title">
5080         <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>
5081       </div>
5082       <div class="date">
5083          7th June 2017
5084       </div>
5085       <div class="body">
5086         <p><em>This is a copy of
5087 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
5088 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
5089 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
5090 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
5091 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
5092 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
5093
5094 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
5095 stored in Noark 5.
5096 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
5097 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
5098 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
5099 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
5100 the documents in the archive.</p>
5101
5102 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
5103 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
5104 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
5105 stamping?</p>
5106
5107 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
5108 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
5109 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
5110 attributes:</p>
5111
5112 <ul>
5113
5114 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
5115 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
5116 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
5117 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
5118
5119 </ul>
5120
5121 <p>This assume a service following
5122 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
5123 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
5124 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
5125 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
5126 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
5127 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
5128 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
5129 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
5130 itself.</p>
5131
5132 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
5133 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
5134 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
5135 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
5136 compromised.</p>
5137
5138 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
5139 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
5140 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
5141 above).</p>
5142
5143 <p><blockquote><pre>
5144 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
5145   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
5146       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
5147 </pre></blockquote></p>
5148
5149 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
5150 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
5151
5152 <p><blockquote><pre>
5153 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
5154   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
5155 </pre></blockquote></p>
5156
5157 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
5158 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
5159 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
5160 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
5161 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
5162
5163 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
5164
5165 <p><blockquote><pre>
5166 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
5167   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
5168 </pre></blockquote></p>
5169
5170 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
5171 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
5172
5173       </div>
5174       <div class="tags">
5175
5176
5177         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
5178
5179
5180       </div>
5181     </div>
5182     <div class="padding"></div>
5183
5184     <div class="entry">
5185       <div class="title">
5186         <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>
5187       </div>
5188       <div class="date">
5189         19th March 2017
5190       </div>
5191       <div class="body">
5192         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
5193 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
5194 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
5195 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
5196 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
5197 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
5198 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
5199 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
5200 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
5201 Unix User Group
5202 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
5203 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
5204 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
5205 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
5206 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
5207 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
5208 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
5209 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
5210 itches.</p>
5211
5212 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
5213 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
5214 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
5215 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
5216 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
5217 project mailing list</a>.</p>
5218
5219 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
5220 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
5221 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
5222 completed an implementation of a command line tool
5223 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
5224 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
5225 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
5226 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
5227 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
5228 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
5229 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
5230 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
5231 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
5232 our API tester:</p>
5233
5234 <p><blockquote><pre>
5235 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
5236 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
5237 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
5238
5239  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
5240  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
5241 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
5242 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
5243   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
5244   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
5245 ~/src//noark5-tester$
5246 </pre></blockquote></p>
5247
5248 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
5249 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
5250 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
5251 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
5252
5253 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
5254 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
5255 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
5256 tester currently use
5257 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
5258 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
5259 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
5260 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
5261 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
5262 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
5263 specification.</p>
5264
5265 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
5266 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
5267 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
5268 and we have
5269 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
5270 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
5271 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
5272 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
5273 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
5274 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> :).
5275
5276 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
5277 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
5278 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
5279 implemented in Python.</p>
5280
5281       </div>
5282       <div class="tags">
5283
5284
5285         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
5286
5287
5288       </div>
5289     </div>
5290     <div class="padding"></div>
5291
5292     <div class="entry">
5293       <div class="title">
5294         <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>
5295       </div>
5296       <div class="date">
5297          9th March 2017
5298       </div>
5299       <div class="body">
5300         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
5301 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
5302 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
5303 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
5304 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
5305 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
5306 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
5307 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
5308
5309 <p><blockquote>
5310 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
5311 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
5312 </blockquote></p>
5313
5314 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
5315 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
5316 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
5317 are noticed.</p>
5318
5319 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
5320 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
5321 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
5322 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
5323 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
5324 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
5325
5326 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
5327 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
5328 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
5329 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
5330 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
5331 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
5332
5333 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
5334
5335 <p><blockquote><pre>
5336 [...]
5337 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
5338 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
5339         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
5340         age:    7863311
5341         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
5342         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
5343         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
5344         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
5345         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
5346         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
5347         per-op statistics
5348                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5349              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
5350              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
5351               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
5352               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
5353             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
5354                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
5355                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
5356               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
5357                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
5358              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
5359                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
5360               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
5361                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
5362               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
5363                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
5364              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
5365          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
5366               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
5367               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
5368             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
5369               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5370
5371 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
5372 [...]
5373 </pre></blockquote></p>
5374
5375 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
5376 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
5377 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
5378 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
5379 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
5380 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
5381 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
5382 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
5383 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
5384 mount options.</p>
5385
5386 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
5387 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
5388 But according to
5389 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
5390 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
5391 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
5392 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
5393 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
5394 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
5395
5396 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
5397 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
5398 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
5399 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
5400 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
5401
5402       </div>
5403       <div class="tags">
5404
5405
5406         Tags: <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>.
5407
5408
5409       </div>
5410     </div>
5411     <div class="padding"></div>
5412
5413     <div class="entry">
5414       <div class="title">
5415         <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>
5416       </div>
5417       <div class="date">
5418          8th March 2017
5419       </div>
5420       <div class="body">
5421         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
5422 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
5423 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
5424 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
5425 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
5426 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
5427 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
5428
5429 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
5430 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
5431 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
5432 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
5433 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
5434 world.</p>
5435
5436 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
5437 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
5438 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
5439 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
5440
5441 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
5442 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
5443 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
5444 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
5445 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
5446 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
5447 unable to grasp it.</p>
5448
5449 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
5450 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
5451 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
5452
5453       </div>
5454       <div class="tags">
5455
5456
5457         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>.
5458
5459
5460       </div>
5461     </div>
5462     <div class="padding"></div>
5463
5464     <div class="entry">
5465       <div class="title">
5466         <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>
5467       </div>
5468       <div class="date">
5469          3rd March 2017
5470       </div>
5471       <div class="body">
5472         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
5473 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
5474 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
5475 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
5476 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
5477 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
5478 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
5479 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
5480 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
5481
5482 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
5483
5484 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
5485 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
5486 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
5487 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
5488 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
5489 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
5490 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
5491 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
5492
5493       </div>
5494       <div class="tags">
5495
5496
5497         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>.
5498
5499
5500       </div>
5501     </div>
5502     <div class="padding"></div>
5503
5504     <div class="entry">
5505       <div class="title">
5506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
5507       </div>
5508       <div class="date">
5509          1st March 2017
5510       </div>
5511       <div class="body">
5512         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
5513 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
5514 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
5515 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
5516 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
5517 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
5518 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
5519 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
5520 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
5521 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
5522 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
5523
5524 <blockquote><pre>
5525 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5526   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
5527   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
5528      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5529      sleep 1; \
5530   done
5531 300
5532 0+1 oppføringer inn
5533 0+1 oppføringer ut
5534 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
5535 4
5536 8
5537 12
5538 17
5539 21
5540 %
5541 </pre></blockquote>
5542
5543 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
5544 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
5545 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
5546 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
5547
5548 <blockquote><pre>
5549 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5550   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
5551   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
5552      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5553      sleep 1; \
5554   done
5555 1079
5556 0+1 oppføringer inn
5557 0+1 oppføringer ut
5558 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
5559 433
5560 1028
5561 1031
5562 1035
5563 1038
5564 %
5565 </pre></blockquote>
5566
5567 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
5568 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
5569
5570 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
5571 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
5572 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
5573 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
5574 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
5575 post.</p>
5576
5577       </div>
5578       <div class="tags">
5579
5580
5581         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5582
5583
5584       </div>
5585     </div>
5586     <div class="padding"></div>
5587
5588     <div class="entry">
5589       <div class="title">
5590         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
5591       </div>
5592       <div class="date">
5593         21st February 2017
5594       </div>
5595       <div class="body">
5596         <p>I just noticed
5597 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
5598 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
5599 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
5600 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
5601 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
5602 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
5603 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
5604 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
5605 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
5606 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
5607
5608 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
5609 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
5610 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
5611 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
5612 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
5613 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
5614 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
5615 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
5616 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
5617
5618       </div>
5619       <div class="tags">
5620
5621
5622         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>.
5623
5624
5625       </div>
5626     </div>
5627     <div class="padding"></div>
5628
5629     <div class="entry">
5630       <div class="title">
5631         <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>
5632       </div>
5633       <div class="date">
5634         13th February 2017
5635       </div>
5636       <div class="body">
5637         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
5638 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
5639 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
5640 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
5641 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
5642 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
5643 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
5644 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
5645 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
5646 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
5647 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
5648 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
5649 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
5650
5651 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
5652 Norwegian from
5653 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
5654 blog</a>.  This also include
5655 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
5656 ruling itself</a>.</p>
5657
5658       </div>
5659       <div class="tags">
5660
5661
5662         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>.
5663
5664
5665       </div>
5666     </div>
5667     <div class="padding"></div>
5668
5669     <div class="entry">
5670       <div class="title">
5671         <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>
5672       </div>
5673       <div class="date">
5674          3rd February 2017
5675       </div>
5676       <div class="body">
5677         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
5678
5679 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
5680 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
5681 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
5682 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
5683 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
5684 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
5685 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
5686 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
5687 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
5688
5689 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
5690 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
5691 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
5692 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
5693 year, without following
5694 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
5695 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
5696 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
5697 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
5698 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
5699 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
5700 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
5701 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
5702 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
5703 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
5704 millions of movies
5705 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
5706 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
5707 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
5708 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
5709 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
5710 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
5711
5712 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
5713 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
5714 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
5715 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
5716 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
5717 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
5718 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
5719 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
5720 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
5721 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
5722 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
5723 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
5724 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
5725
5726 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
5727 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
5728 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
5729 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
5730 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
5731 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
5732 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
5733 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
5734 seriously.</p>
5735
5736 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
5737 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
5738 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
5739 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
5740 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
5741 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
5742 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
5743 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
5744 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
5745
5746 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
5747 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
5748 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
5749 on both sides.</p>
5750
5751       </div>
5752       <div class="tags">
5753
5754
5755         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>.
5756
5757
5758       </div>
5759     </div>
5760     <div class="padding"></div>
5761
5762     <div class="entry">
5763       <div class="title">
5764         <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>
5765       </div>
5766       <div class="date">
5767          9th January 2017
5768       </div>
5769       <div class="body">
5770         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
5771 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
5772 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
5773 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
5774 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
5775 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
5776 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
5777 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
5778 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
5779 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
5780 this:
5781
5782 <p><pre>
5783 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
5784  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
5785  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
5786  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
5787  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
5788  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
5789  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
5790  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
5791  8  * * *
5792  9  * * *
5793 [...]
5794 </pre></p>
5795
5796 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
5797 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
5798 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
5799 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
5800 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
5801 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
5802 traceroute request.</p>
5803
5804 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
5805 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
5806 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
5807 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
5808 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
5809
5810 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
5811 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
5812 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
5813 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
5814 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
5815 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
5816 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
5817 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
5818 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
5819
5820 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
5821 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
5822 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
5823 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
5824 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
5825 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
5826 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
5827 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
5828 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
5829 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
5830 render the page (in HAR format using
5831 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
5832 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
5833 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
5834 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
5835 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
5836
5837 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
5838 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>
5839
5840 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
5841 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
5842 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
5843 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
5844 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
5845 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
5846 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
5847 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
5848 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
5849 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
5850 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
5851 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
5852 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
5853 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
5854
5855 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
5856 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>
5857
5858 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
5859 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
5860 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
5861 question.
5862 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
5863 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
5864 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
5865 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
5866 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
5867 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
5868 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
5869
5870 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
5871 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>
5872
5873 <p>In the process, I came across the
5874 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
5875 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
5876 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
5877 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
5878 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
5879 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
5880 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
5881 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
5882 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
5883 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
5884 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
5885 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
5886 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
5887 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
5888
5889 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
5890 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>
5891
5892 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
5893 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
5894 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
5895 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
5896
5897 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
5898 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
5899 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
5900 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
5901 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
5902 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
5903 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
5904
5905 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
5906 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
5907 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
5908 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
5909 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
5910 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
5911 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
5912
5913 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
5914 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
5915 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
5916 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
5917
5918 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5919 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5920 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5921
5922       </div>
5923       <div class="tags">
5924
5925
5926         Tags: <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>.
5927
5928
5929       </div>
5930     </div>
5931     <div class="padding"></div>
5932
5933     <div class="entry">
5934       <div class="title">
5935         <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>
5936       </div>
5937       <div class="date">
5938          4th January 2017
5939       </div>
5940       <div class="body">
5941         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
5942 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
5943 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
5944 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
5945 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
5946 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
5947 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
5948 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
5949 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
5950 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
5951 consumption.  The
5952 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
5953 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
5954 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
5955 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
5956 module</a>.</p>
5957
5958 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
5959 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
5960 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
5961 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
5962 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
5963 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
5964
5965 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
5966
5967 <p><pre>
5968 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
5969 Found 3612 vevents
5970 Found 6 vtodos
5971 Found 2 vjournals
5972 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
5973 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
5974 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
5975 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
5976 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
5977 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
5978 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
5979 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
5980 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
5981 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
5982 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
5983 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
5984 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
5985 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
5986 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
5987 %
5988 </pre></p>
5989
5990 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
5991 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
5992 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
5993 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
5994 collections.</p>
5995
5996 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
5997 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
5998 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
5999 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
6000 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
6001
6002 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6003 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6004 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6005
6006       </div>
6007       <div class="tags">
6008
6009
6010         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>.
6011
6012
6013       </div>
6014     </div>
6015     <div class="padding"></div>
6016
6017     <div class="entry">
6018       <div class="title">
6019         <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>
6020       </div>
6021       <div class="date">
6022         23rd December 2016
6023       </div>
6024       <div class="body">
6025         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
6026 readers probably know, I have been working on the
6027 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
6028 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
6029 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
6030 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
6031 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
6032 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
6033 metadata format.  And today,
6034 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
6035 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
6036 ie using fnmatch():</p>
6037
6038 <p><pre>
6039 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
6040   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
6041 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
6042 Name: pymissile
6043 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
6044 Package: pymissile
6045 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
6046 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
6047 Name: libnxt
6048 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
6049 Package: libnxt
6050 ---
6051 Identifier: t2n [generic]
6052 Name: t2n
6053 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
6054 Package: t2n
6055 ---
6056 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
6057 Name: python-nxt
6058 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
6059 Package: python-nxt
6060 ---
6061 Identifier: nbc [generic]
6062 Name: nbc
6063 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
6064 Package: nbc
6065 %
6066 </pre></p>
6067
6068 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
6069 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
6070
6071 <p><pre>
6072 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
6073 pymissile
6074 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
6075 libnxt
6076 nbc
6077 python-nxt
6078 t2n
6079 %
6080 </pre></p>
6081
6082 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
6083 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
6084
6085 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
6086 make the most of the hardware they have, please
6087 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
6088 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
6089 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
6090 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
6091 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
6092 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
6093 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
6094 part of my involvement in
6095 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
6096 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
6097 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
6098 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
6099 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
6100 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
6101 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
6102 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
6103 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
6104
6105 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6106 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6107 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6108
6109       </div>
6110       <div class="tags">
6111
6112
6113         Tags: <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>.
6114
6115
6116       </div>
6117     </div>
6118     <div class="padding"></div>
6119
6120     <div class="entry">
6121       <div class="title">
6122         <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>
6123       </div>
6124       <div class="date">
6125         20th December 2016
6126       </div>
6127       <div class="body">
6128         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
6129 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
6130 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
6131 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
6132 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
6133 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
6134 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
6135 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
6136 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
6137 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
6138
6139 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
6140
6141 <p><pre>
6142 % isenkram-lookup
6143 bluez
6144 cheese
6145 ethtool
6146 fprintd
6147 fprintd-demo
6148 gkrellm-thinkbat
6149 hdapsd
6150 libpam-fprintd
6151 pidgin-blinklight
6152 thinkfan
6153 tlp
6154 tp-smapi-dkms
6155 tp-smapi-source
6156 tpb
6157 %
6158 </pre></p>
6159
6160 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
6161 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
6162 I have all the firmware my machine need:
6163
6164 <p><pre>
6165 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
6166 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
6167 %
6168 </pre></p>
6169
6170 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
6171 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
6172 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
6173 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
6174 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
6175 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
6176 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
6177 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
6178
6179 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
6180 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
6181 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
6182
6183 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
6184 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
6185 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
6186 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
6187 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
6188 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
6189 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
6190 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
6191 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
6192 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
6193 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
6194 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
6195 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
6196 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
6197 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
6198 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
6199 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
6200 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
6201 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
6202 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
6203 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
6204 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
6205 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
6206 zd1211-firmware</p>
6207
6208 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
6209 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
6210 maintainer to
6211 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
6212 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
6213 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
6214 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
6215
6216 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
6217 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
6218 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
6219 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
6220 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
6221
6222       </div>
6223       <div class="tags">
6224
6225
6226         Tags: <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>.
6227
6228
6229       </div>
6230     </div>
6231     <div class="padding"></div>
6232
6233     <div class="entry">
6234       <div class="title">
6235         <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>
6236       </div>
6237       <div class="date">
6238         11th December 2016
6239       </div>
6240       <div class="body">
6241         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
6242
6243 <p>In my early years, I played
6244 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
6245 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
6246 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
6247 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
6248 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
6249 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
6250 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
6251 small.</p>
6252
6253 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
6254 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
6255 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
6256 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
6257 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
6258 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
6259 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
6260 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
6261 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
6262
6263 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
6264 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
6265 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
6266 advantages of the
6267 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
6268 where information about each planet is easily available with common
6269 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
6270 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
6271 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
6272 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
6273 after less then a week.</p>
6274
6275 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
6276 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
6277 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
6278
6279 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6280 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6281 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6282
6283       </div>
6284       <div class="tags">
6285
6286
6287         Tags: <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>.
6288
6289
6290       </div>
6291     </div>
6292     <div class="padding"></div>
6293
6294     <div class="entry">
6295       <div class="title">
6296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
6297       </div>
6298       <div class="date">
6299         25th November 2016
6300       </div>
6301       <div class="body">
6302         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
6303 installation system, observing how using
6304 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
6305 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
6306 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
6307 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
6308 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
6309 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
6310 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
6311 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
6312 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
6313 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
6314 up the process make perfect sense.
6315
6316 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
6317 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
6318 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
6319 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
6320 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
6321 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
6322 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
6323 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
6324 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
6325 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
6326
6327 <blockquote><pre>
6328 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
6329 </pre></blockquote>
6330
6331 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
6332 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
6333 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
6334 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
6335 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
6336 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
6337 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
6338 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
6339 tested its impact.</p>
6340
6341
6342       </div>
6343       <div class="tags">
6344
6345
6346         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>.
6347
6348
6349       </div>
6350     </div>
6351     <div class="padding"></div>
6352
6353     <div class="entry">
6354       <div class="title">
6355         <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>
6356       </div>
6357       <div class="date">
6358         13th November 2016
6359       </div>
6360       <div class="body">
6361         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
6362 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
6363 multi-threaded program, finally
6364 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
6365 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
6366 months since
6367 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
6368 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
6369 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
6370 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
6371 JavaScript libraries.</p>
6372
6373 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
6374
6375 <p><blockquote>
6376 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
6377 </blockquote></p>
6378
6379 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
6380 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
6381 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
6382 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
6383 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
6384
6385 <p><blockquote>
6386 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
6387 </blockquote></p>
6388
6389 <p>See the project home page and the
6390 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
6391 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
6392 working.</p>
6393
6394       </div>
6395       <div class="tags">
6396
6397
6398         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6399
6400
6401       </div>
6402     </div>
6403     <div class="padding"></div>
6404
6405     <div class="entry">
6406       <div class="title">
6407         <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>
6408       </div>
6409       <div class="date">
6410          7th November 2016
6411       </div>
6412       <div class="body">
6413         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
6414 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
6415 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
6416 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
6417 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
6418 a blog post from Sander Venima about
6419 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
6420 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
6421 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
6422 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
6423 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
6424 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
6425 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
6426 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
6427 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
6428 use, it is also useful to have a look at
6429 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
6430 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
6431 provide valuable information.</p>
6432
6433 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
6434 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
6435 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
6436 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
6437 used by many:</p>
6438
6439 <ul>
6440
6441 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
6442 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
6443 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
6444 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
6445 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
6446
6447 </ul>
6448
6449 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
6450
6451 <ul>
6452
6453 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
6454 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
6455 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
6456 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
6457 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
6458
6459 </ul>
6460
6461 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
6462
6463 <ul>
6464
6465 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
6466 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
6467 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
6468 <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>
6469 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
6470 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
6471 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
6472 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
6473 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
6474 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
6475
6476 </ul>
6477
6478 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
6479 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
6480 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
6481
6482 <ul>
6483
6484 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
6485 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
6486 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
6487 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
6488
6489 </ul>
6490
6491 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
6492 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
6493 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
6494 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
6495 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
6496 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
6497 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
6498 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
6499 their loved ones.</p>
6500
6501 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
6502 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
6503 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
6504 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
6505 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
6506 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
6507 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
6508 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
6509 a non-starter for most.</p>
6510
6511 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
6512 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
6513 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
6514 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
6515 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
6516 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
6517 less invaded.</p>
6518
6519 <p><strong>Update 2019-10-08</strong>: Børge Dvergsdal, who told me he
6520   is Customer Relationship Manager @ Whereby (formerly appear.in),
6521   asked if I could mention that appear.in is now renamed and found at
6522   <a href="https://whereby.com/">https://whereby.com/</a>.  And sure,
6523   why not.  Apparently they changed the name because they were unable
6524   to trademark appear.in somewhere...  While I am at it, I can mention
6525   that Ring changed name to Jami, now available from <a
6526   href="https://jami.net/">https://jami.net/</a>.  Luckily they were
6527   able to have a direct redirect from ring.cx to jami.net, so the user
6528   experience is almost the same.</p>
6529
6530       </div>
6531       <div class="tags">
6532
6533
6534         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>.
6535
6536
6537       </div>
6538     </div>
6539     <div class="padding"></div>
6540
6541     <div class="entry">
6542       <div class="title">
6543         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
6544       </div>
6545       <div class="date">
6546          4th November 2016
6547       </div>
6548       <div class="body">
6549         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
6550 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
6551 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
6552 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
6553 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
6554 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
6555 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
6556 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
6557 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
6558 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
6559 and had
6560 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
6561 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
6562 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
6563 loved ones. :)</p>
6564
6565 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
6566 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
6567 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
6568 building
6569 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
6570 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
6571 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
6572 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
6573 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
6574 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
6575 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
6576 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
6577
6578 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
6579
6580 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
6581 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
6582 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
6583 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
6584 the battery status run low:</p>
6585
6586 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
6587    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
6588 </video></p>
6589
6590 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
6591 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
6592
6593 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
6594 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
6595 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
6596 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
6597 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
6598 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
6599 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
6600 should.</p>
6601
6602       </div>
6603       <div class="tags">
6604
6605
6606         Tags: <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>.
6607
6608
6609       </div>
6610     </div>
6611     <div class="padding"></div>
6612
6613     <div class="entry">
6614       <div class="title">
6615         <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>
6616       </div>
6617       <div class="date">
6618         10th October 2016
6619       </div>
6620       <div class="body">
6621         <p>In July
6622 <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
6623 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
6624 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
6625 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
6626
6627 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
6628 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
6629 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
6630 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
6631 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
6632 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
6633 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
6634 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
6635 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
6636 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
6637 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
6638 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
6639 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
6640 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
6641 time.</p>
6642
6643 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
6644 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
6645 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
6646 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
6647 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
6648 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
6649 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
6650
6651 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
6652 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
6653 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
6654 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
6655 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
6656 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
6657 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
6658 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
6659 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
6660 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
6661
6662 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
6663
6664 <ol>
6665
6666 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
6667 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
6668 know, so you need to install it.
6669
6670 <pre>
6671 apt install git tor chromium
6672 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
6673 </pre></li>
6674
6675 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
6676 block below.</li>
6677
6678 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
6679 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
6680
6681 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
6682 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
6683 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
6684 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
6685 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
6686
6687 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
6688 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
6689 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
6690 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
6691 a associated contact database.</li>
6692
6693 </ol>
6694
6695 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
6696 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
6697 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
6698 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
6699 example
6700 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
6701 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
6702 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
6703 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
6704 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
6705 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
6706 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
6707 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
6708 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
6709 working on Debian Stable.</p>
6710
6711 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
6712 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
6713 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
6714
6715 <pre>
6716 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
6717 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
6718 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
6719 --- a/js/background.js
6720 +++ b/js/background.js
6721 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
6722          });
6723      });
6724
6725 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
6726 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
6727      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
6728 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
6729 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
6730      var messageReceiver;
6731      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
6732          if (messageReceiver) {
6733 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
6734 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
6735 --- a/js/expire.js
6736 +++ b/js/expire.js
6737 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
6738  ;(function() {
6739      'use strict';
6740 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
6741 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
6742
6743      window.extension = window.extension || {};
6744
6745 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
6746 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
6747 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
6748 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
6749 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
6750              return {
6751                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
6752                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
6753 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
6754 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
6755 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
6756              };
6757          },
6758          clearQR: function() {
6759 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
6760 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
6761 --- a/options.html
6762 +++ b/options.html
6763 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
6764          &lt;div class='nav'>
6765            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
6766            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
6767 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
6768 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
6769 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
6770 +
6771 +         &lt;/div>
6772            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
6773            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
6774            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
6775 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
6776 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
6777 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
6778 +#!/bin/sh
6779 +set -e
6780 +cd $(dirname $0)
6781 +mkdir -p userdata
6782 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
6783 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
6784 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
6785 +fi
6786 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
6787 +exec chromium \
6788 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
6789 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
6790 EOF
6791 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
6792 </pre>
6793
6794 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6795 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6796 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6797
6798       </div>
6799       <div class="tags">
6800
6801
6802         Tags: <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>.
6803
6804
6805       </div>
6806     </div>
6807     <div class="padding"></div>
6808
6809     <div class="entry">
6810       <div class="title">
6811         <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>
6812       </div>
6813       <div class="date">
6814          7th October 2016
6815       </div>
6816       <div class="body">
6817         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
6818 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
6819 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
6820 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
6821 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
6822 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
6823 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
6824 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
6825 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
6826 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
6827 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
6828 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
6829 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
6830
6831 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
6832 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
6833 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
6834 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
6835 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
6836 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
6837
6838 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
6839 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
6840 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
6841 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
6842 identifiers.</p>
6843
6844 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
6845 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
6846 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
6847 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
6848 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
6849 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
6850 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
6851 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
6852 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
6853 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
6854 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
6855 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
6856 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
6857 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
6858
6859 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
6860 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
6861 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
6862 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
6863 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
6864 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
6865 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
6866
6867 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
6868 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
6869 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
6870 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
6871 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
6872 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
6873 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
6874 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
6875 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
6876 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
6877 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
6878 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
6879 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
6880 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
6881 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
6882 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
6883 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
6884
6885 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
6886 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
6887 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
6888 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
6889 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
6890 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
6891 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
6892
6893 <p><pre>
6894 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
6895     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
6896 </pre></p>
6897
6898 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
6899 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
6900 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
6901 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
6902 to detect this?</p>
6903
6904 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
6905 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
6906 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
6907 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
6908 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
6909 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
6910 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
6911 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
6912 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
6913 directly if no such class exist.</p>
6914
6915 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6916 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6917 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6918
6919 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
6920 please join us on our IRC channel
6921 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
6922 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
6923 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
6924 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
6925
6926 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6927 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6928 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6929
6930       </div>
6931       <div class="tags">
6932
6933
6934         Tags: <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>.
6935
6936
6937       </div>
6938     </div>
6939     <div class="padding"></div>
6940
6941     <div class="entry">
6942       <div class="title">
6943         <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>
6944       </div>
6945       <div class="date">
6946         30th August 2016
6947       </div>
6948       <div class="body">
6949         <p>In April we
6950 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
6951 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
6952 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
6953 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
6954 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
6955 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
6956 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
6957 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
6958 contributing using
6959 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
6960 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
6961 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
6962 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
6963 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
6964 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
6965 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
6966
6967 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
6968 electronic form.</p>
6969
6970       </div>
6971       <div class="tags">
6972
6973
6974         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>.
6975
6976
6977       </div>
6978     </div>
6979     <div class="padding"></div>
6980
6981     <div class="entry">
6982       <div class="title">
6983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
6984       </div>
6985       <div class="date">
6986         11th August 2016
6987       </div>
6988       <div class="body">
6989         <p>This summer, I read a great article
6990 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
6991 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
6992 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
6993 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
6994 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
6995 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
6996 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
6997 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
6998 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
6999 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
7000 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
7001 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
7002
7003 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
7004 get the system into Debian.  I
7005 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
7006 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
7007 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
7008 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
7009 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
7010 profiling information included in the source package.
7011 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
7012
7013 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
7014 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
7015
7016 <p><blockquote><pre>
7017 coz run --- program-to-run
7018 </pre></blockquote></p>
7019
7020 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
7021 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
7022 most, use a web browser and either point it to
7023 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
7024 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
7025 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
7026 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
7027 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
7028 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
7029 targeted experiments.</p>
7030
7031 <p>A video published by ACM
7032 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
7033 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
7034 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
7035 titled
7036 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
7037 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
7038
7039 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
7040 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
7041 because it uses a
7042 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
7043 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
7044 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
7045 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
7046
7047 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
7048 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
7049 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
7050 C++ libraries.</p>
7051
7052       </div>
7053       <div class="tags">
7054
7055
7056         Tags: <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>.
7057
7058
7059       </div>
7060     </div>
7061     <div class="padding"></div>
7062
7063     <div class="entry">
7064       <div class="title">
7065         <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>
7066       </div>
7067       <div class="date">
7068          5th August 2016
7069       </div>
7070       <div class="body">
7071         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
7072 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
7073 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
7074 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
7075 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
7076 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
7077 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
7078 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
7079 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
7080 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
7081 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
7082 Commons is needed.</p>
7083
7084 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
7085 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
7086 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
7087 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
7088 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
7089 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
7090
7091 <table border="0">
7092 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
7093 <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>
7094 <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>
7095 <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>
7096 </table>
7097
7098 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
7099 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
7100 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
7101 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
7102 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
7103 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
7104 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
7105 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
7106 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
7107 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
7108 as much as I did.</p>
7109
7110 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
7111 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
7112
7113 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
7114 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
7115 touch.</p>
7116
7117       </div>
7118       <div class="tags">
7119
7120
7121         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>.
7122
7123
7124       </div>
7125     </div>
7126     <div class="padding"></div>
7127
7128     <div class="entry">
7129       <div class="title">
7130         <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>
7131       </div>
7132       <div class="date">
7133          1st August 2016
7134       </div>
7135       <div class="body">
7136         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
7137 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
7138 broadcasting talks by or about
7139 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
7140 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
7141 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
7142 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
7143 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
7144 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
7145 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
7146 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
7147 using only free software (all of it
7148 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
7149 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
7150
7151 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
7152 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
7153 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
7154 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
7155 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
7156 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
7157 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
7158 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
7159 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
7160 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
7161 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
7162 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
7163 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
7164 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
7165 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
7166 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
7167 presentations.</p>
7168
7169 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
7170 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
7171 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
7172 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
7173 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
7174
7175       </div>
7176       <div class="tags">
7177
7178
7179         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>.
7180
7181
7182       </div>
7183     </div>
7184     <div class="padding"></div>
7185
7186     <div class="entry">
7187       <div class="title">
7188         <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>
7189       </div>
7190       <div class="date">
7191          7th July 2016
7192       </div>
7193       <div class="body">
7194         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
7195 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
7196 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
7197 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
7198 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
7199 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
7200 microphone The initial idea had been to just
7201 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
7202 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
7203 until a few days ago.</p>
7204
7205 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
7206 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
7207 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
7208 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
7209 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
7210 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
7211 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
7212
7213 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
7214 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
7215 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
7216 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
7217 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
7218 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
7219 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
7220 him.</p>
7221
7222 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
7223 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
7224 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
7225 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
7226 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
7227 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
7228 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
7229 devices it would work for.</p>
7230
7231 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
7232 followed some instructions
7233 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
7234 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
7235 machine with Debian testing:</p>
7236
7237 <p><pre>
7238 adb reboot-bootloader
7239 fastboot oem rebootRUU
7240 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
7241 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
7242 fastboot reboot
7243 </pre></p>
7244
7245 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
7246 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
7247 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
7248 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
7249 too.</p>
7250
7251 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
7252 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
7253 like this:</p>
7254
7255 <p><pre>
7256 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
7257 </pre>
7258
7259 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
7260 this:</p>
7261
7262 <p><pre>
7263 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
7264 </pre></p>
7265
7266 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
7267 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
7268 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
7269 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
7270 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
7271
7272       </div>
7273       <div class="tags">
7274
7275
7276         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>.
7277
7278
7279       </div>
7280     </div>
7281     <div class="padding"></div>
7282
7283     <div class="entry">
7284       <div class="title">
7285         <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>
7286       </div>
7287       <div class="date">
7288          3rd July 2016
7289       </div>
7290       <div class="body">
7291         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
7292 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
7293 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
7294 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
7295 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
7296 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
7297 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
7298 Github source, compared it to the source in
7299 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
7300 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
7301 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
7302 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
7303 the recipe how I did it.</p>
7304
7305 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
7306
7307 <pre>
7308 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
7309 </pre>
7310
7311 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
7312 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
7313
7314 <pre>
7315 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
7316 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
7317 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
7318 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
7319 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
7320          });
7321      });
7322
7323 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
7324 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
7325 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
7326 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
7327      var messageReceiver;
7328      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
7329          if (messageReceiver) {
7330 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
7331 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
7332 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
7333 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
7334  ;(function() {
7335      'use strict';
7336 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
7337 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
7338
7339      window.extension = window.extension || {};
7340
7341 EOF
7342 </pre>
7343
7344 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
7345 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
7346 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
7347 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
7348
7349 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
7350 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
7351
7352 <pre>
7353 #!/bin/sh
7354 cd $(dirname $0)
7355 mkdir -p userdata
7356 exec chromium \
7357   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
7358   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
7359 </pre>
7360
7361 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
7362 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
7363 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
7364 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
7365 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
7366
7367 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
7368 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
7369 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
7370 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
7371 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
7372 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
7373 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
7374 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
7375 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
7376 Signal from my laptop.
7377
7378 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
7379 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
7380 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
7381 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
7382 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
7383 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
7384 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
7385 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
7386 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
7387 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
7388 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
7389 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
7390
7391 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
7392 on this topic in
7393 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
7394 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
7395 phone</a>.</p>
7396
7397       </div>
7398       <div class="tags">
7399
7400
7401         Tags: <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>.
7402
7403
7404       </div>
7405     </div>
7406     <div class="padding"></div>
7407
7408     <div class="entry">
7409       <div class="title">
7410         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
7411       </div>
7412       <div class="date">
7413          6th June 2016
7414       </div>
7415       <div class="body">
7416         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
7417 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
7418 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
7419 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
7420 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
7421 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
7422 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
7423 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
7424 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
7425
7426 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
7427 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
7428 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
7429 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
7430 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
7431 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
7432 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
7433
7434 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
7435 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
7436 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
7437 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
7438 toten and parole.</p>
7439
7440 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
7441 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
7442 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
7443 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
7444 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
7445 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
7446 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
7447 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
7448 formats.</p>
7449
7450       </div>
7451       <div class="tags">
7452
7453
7454         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>.
7455
7456
7457       </div>
7458     </div>
7459     <div class="padding"></div>
7460
7461     <div class="entry">
7462       <div class="title">
7463         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
7464       </div>
7465       <div class="date">
7466          5th June 2016
7467       </div>
7468       <div class="body">
7469         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
7470 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
7471 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
7472 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
7473 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
7474 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
7475 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
7476 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
7477 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
7478 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
7479 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
7480 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
7481 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
7482 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
7483 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
7484 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
7485 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
7486 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
7487 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
7488 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
7489
7490 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
7491 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
7492 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
7493 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
7494 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
7495 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
7496 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
7497 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
7498 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
7499 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
7500 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
7501 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
7502 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
7503 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
7504
7505 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
7506 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
7507 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
7508 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
7509 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
7510 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
7511 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
7512 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
7513
7514 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
7515 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
7516 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
7517 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
7518 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
7519 information is collected from
7520 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
7521 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
7522 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
7523 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
7524 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
7525 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
7526 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
7527 type (preferably
7528 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
7529 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
7530 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
7531 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
7532
7533 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
7534 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
7535 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
7536
7537 <p><blockquote><pre>
7538 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
7539 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
7540   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
7541     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
7542     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
7543     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
7544   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
7545 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
7546 </pre></blockquote></p>
7547
7548 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
7549 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
7550 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
7551 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
7552
7553 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
7554 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
7555 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
7556
7557 <p><blockquote><pre>
7558 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
7559 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
7560 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
7561 %
7562 </pre></blockquote></p>
7563
7564 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
7565 MimeType= line.</p>
7566
7567 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
7568 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
7569 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
7570 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
7571 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
7572 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
7573 fixed. :)</p>
7574
7575       </div>
7576       <div class="tags">
7577
7578
7579         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7580
7581
7582       </div>
7583     </div>
7584     <div class="padding"></div>
7585
7586     <div class="entry">
7587       <div class="title">
7588         <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>
7589       </div>
7590       <div class="date">
7591         28th May 2016
7592       </div>
7593       <div class="body">
7594         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
7595 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
7596 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
7597 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
7598 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
7599 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
7600 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
7601 currently publishes its talks.  You can
7602 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
7603 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
7604 on demand page for the talk
7605 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
7606 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
7607
7608 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
7609 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
7610
7611 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
7612   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
7613 </video></p>
7614
7615 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
7616 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
7617
7618       </div>
7619       <div class="tags">
7620
7621
7622         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>.
7623
7624
7625       </div>
7626     </div>
7627     <div class="padding"></div>
7628
7629     <div class="entry">
7630       <div class="title">
7631         <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>
7632       </div>
7633       <div class="date">
7634         25th May 2016
7635       </div>
7636       <div class="body">
7637         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
7638 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
7639 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
7640 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
7641 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
7642 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
7643 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
7644 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
7645 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
7646 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
7647 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
7648 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
7649
7650 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
7651 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
7652 is going away and is generally being replaced by
7653 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
7654 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
7655 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
7656 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
7657 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
7658 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
7659 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
7660 and see if it is recognised.</p>
7661
7662 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
7663 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
7664 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
7665
7666 <p><blockquote><pre>
7667 % isenkram-lookup
7668 bluez
7669 cheese
7670 fprintd
7671 fprintd-demo
7672 gkrellm-thinkbat
7673 hdapsd
7674 libpam-fprintd
7675 pidgin-blinklight
7676 thinkfan
7677 tleds
7678 tp-smapi-dkms
7679 tp-smapi-source
7680 tpb
7681 %p
7682 </pre></blockquote></p>
7683
7684 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
7685 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
7686 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
7687 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
7688 See
7689 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
7690 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
7691
7692       </div>
7693       <div class="tags">
7694
7695
7696         Tags: <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>.
7697
7698
7699       </div>
7700     </div>
7701     <div class="padding"></div>
7702
7703     <div class="entry">
7704       <div class="title">
7705         <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>
7706       </div>
7707       <div class="date">
7708         23rd May 2016
7709       </div>
7710       <div class="body">
7711         <p>Yesterday I updated the
7712 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
7713 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
7714 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
7715 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
7716 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
7717 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
7718 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
7719 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
7720 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
7721 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
7722
7723 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
7724 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
7725 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
7726 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
7727 capacity.</p>
7728
7729 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
7730
7731 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
7732 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
7733 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
7734 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
7735
7736 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
7737
7738 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
7739 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
7740 shrinking. :(</p>
7741
7742 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
7743 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
7744 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
7745 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
7746 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
7747 machine.</p>
7748
7749 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
7750 check out the
7751 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
7752 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
7753 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
7754 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
7755 Patches are very welcome.</p>
7756
7757 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7758 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7759 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7760
7761       </div>
7762       <div class="tags">
7763
7764
7765         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7766
7767
7768       </div>
7769     </div>
7770     <div class="padding"></div>
7771
7772     <div class="entry">
7773       <div class="title">
7774         <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>
7775       </div>
7776       <div class="date">
7777         21st May 2016
7778       </div>
7779       <div class="body">
7780         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
7781 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
7782 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
7783 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
7784 ($19.99),
7785 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
7786 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
7787 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
7788 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
7789 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
7790 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
7791 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
7792 less).</p>
7793
7794 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
7795 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
7796 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
7797 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
7798 the paperback edition, they are
7799 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
7800 from github</a>.</p>
7801
7802       </div>
7803       <div class="tags">
7804
7805
7806         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>.
7807
7808
7809       </div>
7810     </div>
7811     <div class="padding"></div>
7812
7813     <div class="entry">
7814       <div class="title">
7815         <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>
7816       </div>
7817       <div class="date">
7818         19th May 2016
7819       </div>
7820       <div class="body">
7821         <p>I just donated to the
7822 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
7823 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
7824 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
7825 me will do the same.</p>
7826
7827 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
7828 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
7829 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
7830 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
7831 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
7832 make me worried.</p>
7833
7834 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
7835 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
7836 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
7837 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
7838 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
7839 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
7840 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
7841 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
7842 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
7843 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
7844 holders permissions.</p>
7845
7846 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
7847 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
7848 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
7849 and
7850 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
7851 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
7852 on
7853 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
7854 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
7855 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
7856 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
7857 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
7858 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
7859
7860 <p>I
7861 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
7862 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
7863 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
7864 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
7865 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
7866 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
7867 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
7868 those that want to support the request.</p>
7869
7870 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
7871 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
7872 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
7873 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
7874 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
7875
7876       </div>
7877       <div class="tags">
7878
7879
7880         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>.
7881
7882
7883       </div>
7884     </div>
7885     <div class="padding"></div>
7886
7887     <div class="entry">
7888       <div class="title">
7889         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
7890       </div>
7891       <div class="date">
7892         12th May 2016
7893       </div>
7894       <div class="body">
7895         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
7896 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
7897 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
7898 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
7899 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
7900 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7901 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
7902 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
7903 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
7904 great if you could help out with
7905 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
7906 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
7907
7908       </div>
7909       <div class="tags">
7910
7911
7912         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7913
7914
7915       </div>
7916     </div>
7917     <div class="padding"></div>
7918
7919     <div class="entry">
7920       <div class="title">
7921         <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>
7922       </div>
7923       <div class="date">
7924          8th May 2016
7925       </div>
7926       <div class="body">
7927         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
7928 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
7929
7930 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
7931 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
7932 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
7933 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
7934 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
7935 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
7936 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
7937 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
7938 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
7939 players.</p>
7940
7941 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
7942 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
7943 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
7944 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
7945 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
7946 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
7947 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
7948 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
7949 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
7950 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
7951 support most file formats.</p>
7952
7953 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
7954 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
7955 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
7956 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
7957 listed first in the table.</p>
7958
7959 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
7960 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
7961 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
7962 support?</p>
7963
7964       </div>
7965       <div class="tags">
7966
7967
7968         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>.
7969
7970
7971       </div>
7972     </div>
7973     <div class="padding"></div>
7974
7975     <div class="entry">
7976       <div class="title">
7977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
7978       </div>
7979       <div class="date">
7980          4th May 2016
7981       </div>
7982       <div class="body">
7983         A friend of mine made me aware of
7984 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
7985 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
7986 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
7987
7988 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
7989 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
7990 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
7991 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
7992 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
7993 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
7994 production started.</p>
7995
7996 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
7997 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
7998 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
7999
8000       </div>
8001       <div class="tags">
8002
8003
8004         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8005
8006
8007       </div>
8008     </div>
8009     <div class="padding"></div>
8010
8011     <div class="entry">
8012       <div class="title">
8013         <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>
8014       </div>
8015       <div class="date">
8016         18th April 2016
8017       </div>
8018       <div class="body">
8019         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
8020 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
8021 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
8022 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
8023 will
8024 <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
8025 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
8026 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
8027 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
8028 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
8029 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
8030 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
8031 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
8032 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
8033 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
8034
8035       </div>
8036       <div class="tags">
8037
8038
8039         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>.
8040
8041
8042       </div>
8043     </div>
8044     <div class="padding"></div>
8045
8046     <div class="entry">
8047       <div class="title">
8048         <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>
8049       </div>
8050       <div class="date">
8051         13th April 2016
8052       </div>
8053       <div class="body">
8054         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
8055 Schwarz on The Intercept
8056 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
8057 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
8058 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
8059 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
8060 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
8061 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
8062 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
8063 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
8064 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
8065 inspiring to read even today.</p>
8066
8067 <p><blockquote>
8068 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
8069 <br>- I. F. Stone
8070 </blockquote></p>
8071
8072 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
8073 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
8074 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
8075 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
8076 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
8077 check him out.</p>
8078
8079       </div>
8080       <div class="tags">
8081
8082
8083         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>.
8084
8085
8086       </div>
8087     </div>
8088     <div class="padding"></div>
8089
8090     <div class="entry">
8091       <div class="title">
8092         <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>
8093       </div>
8094       <div class="date">
8095         12th April 2016
8096       </div>
8097       <div class="body">
8098         <p>I'm happy to report that
8099 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
8100 French paperback edition</a> of
8101 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
8102 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
8103 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
8104 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
8105 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
8106 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
8107
8108 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
8109 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
8110 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
8111 available from
8112 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
8113 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
8114 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
8115 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
8116 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
8117 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
8118 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
8119
8120 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
8121 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
8122 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
8123 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
8124 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
8125 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
8126 that the revenue for these editions go to the
8127 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
8128 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
8129 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
8130 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
8131 and
8132 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
8133 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
8134 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
8135 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
8136 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
8137
8138 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
8139 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
8140 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
8141 to make this happen.</p>
8142
8143       </div>
8144       <div class="tags">
8145
8146
8147         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>.
8148
8149
8150       </div>
8151     </div>
8152     <div class="padding"></div>
8153
8154     <div class="entry">
8155       <div class="title">
8156         <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>
8157       </div>
8158       <div class="date">
8159         10th April 2016
8160       </div>
8161       <div class="body">
8162         <p>During this weekends
8163 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
8164 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
8165 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
8166 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
8167 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
8168 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
8169 contributing using
8170 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
8171 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
8172 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
8173 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
8174 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
8175 contributors</a>.</p>
8176
8177 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
8178 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
8179 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
8180 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
8181 available for many more languages.</p>
8182
8183       </div>
8184       <div class="tags">
8185
8186
8187         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>.
8188
8189
8190       </div>
8191     </div>
8192     <div class="padding"></div>
8193
8194     <div class="entry">
8195       <div class="title">
8196         <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>
8197       </div>
8198       <div class="date">
8199          7th April 2016
8200       </div>
8201       <div class="body">
8202         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
8203 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
8204 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
8205 But I might be wrong.</p>
8206
8207 <p>According to
8208 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
8209 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
8210 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
8211 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
8212 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
8213 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
8214 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
8215 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
8216 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
8217 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
8218
8219 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
8220 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
8221 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
8222 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
8223 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
8224 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
8225 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
8226 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
8227 team status page</a>, and
8228 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
8229 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
8230
8231 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
8232 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
8233 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
8234 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
8235 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
8236 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
8237 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
8238 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
8239 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
8240 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
8241 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
8242 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
8243
8244       </div>
8245       <div class="tags">
8246
8247
8248         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8249
8250
8251       </div>
8252     </div>
8253     <div class="padding"></div>
8254
8255     <div class="entry">
8256       <div class="title">
8257         <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>
8258       </div>
8259       <div class="date">
8260          2nd April 2016
8261       </div>
8262       <div class="body">
8263         <p>Two years ago, I had
8264 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
8265 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
8266 other things noted a still open
8267 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
8268 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
8269 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
8270 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
8271 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
8272 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
8273 using only curl:</p>
8274
8275 <p><pre>
8276 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
8277   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
8278          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
8279 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
8280 </pre></p>
8281
8282 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
8283 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
8284 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
8285 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
8286 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
8287 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
8288 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
8289
8290 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
8291 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
8292 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
8293 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
8294 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
8295 service certificate.</p>
8296
8297 <p><pre>
8298 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
8299 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
8300 </pre></p>
8301
8302 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
8303 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
8304 Timestamping</a> and
8305 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
8306 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
8307 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
8308 Among the latter is
8309 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
8310 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
8311 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
8312 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
8313 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
8314 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
8315 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
8316 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
8317 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
8318 a document was created.</p>
8319
8320 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
8321 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
8322 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
8323 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
8324 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
8325 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
8326
8327 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
8328 searched, so I decided to try to
8329 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
8330 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
8331 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
8332 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
8333 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
8334 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
8335 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
8336 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
8337 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
8338 this:
8339
8340 <p><pre>
8341 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
8342 </pre></p>
8343
8344 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
8345 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
8346 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
8347 --verify option:</p>
8348
8349 <p><pre>
8350 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
8351 </pre></p>
8352
8353 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
8354 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
8355 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
8356 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
8357 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
8358 verification later.</p>
8359
8360 <p>Please check out
8361 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
8362 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
8363 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
8364 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
8365 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
8366
8367 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8368 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8369 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8370
8371       </div>
8372       <div class="tags">
8373
8374
8375         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>.
8376
8377
8378       </div>
8379     </div>
8380     <div class="padding"></div>
8381
8382     <div class="entry">
8383       <div class="title">
8384         <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>
8385       </div>
8386       <div class="date">
8387         23rd March 2016
8388       </div>
8389       <div class="body">
8390         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
8391 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
8392 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
8393 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
8394 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
8395 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
8396 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
8397 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
8398
8399 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
8400 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
8401 and lifetime prediction by running:
8402
8403 <p><pre>
8404 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
8405 </pre></p>
8406
8407 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
8408
8409 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
8410 entry yet):</p>
8411
8412 <p><pre>
8413 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
8414 </pre></p>
8415
8416 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
8417 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
8418 few years of data.</p>
8419
8420 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
8421 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
8422 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
8423 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
8424 know.  The issue is reported as
8425 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
8426 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
8427 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
8428 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
8429 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
8430
8431 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
8432 check out the
8433 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
8434 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
8435 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
8436 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
8437 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
8438
8439       </div>
8440       <div class="tags">
8441
8442
8443         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8444
8445
8446       </div>
8447     </div>
8448     <div class="padding"></div>
8449
8450     <div class="entry">
8451       <div class="title">
8452         <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>
8453       </div>
8454       <div class="date">
8455         19th March 2016
8456       </div>
8457       <div class="body">
8458         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
8459 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
8460 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
8461 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
8462 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
8463 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
8464 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
8465 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
8466 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
8467
8468 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
8469 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
8470 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
8471 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
8472 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
8473 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
8474 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
8475 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
8476 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
8477
8478 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
8479 {
8480  "vh":500.00,
8481  "vm":0,
8482  "vl":0,
8483  "uqr":1,
8484  "tp":1,
8485  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
8486  "cc":"NO",
8487  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
8488  "iref":"12300001",
8489  "idt":"20151022",
8490  "ddt":"20151105",
8491  "due":2500.0000,
8492  "cur":"NOK",
8493  "pt":"BBAN",
8494  "acc":"17202612345",
8495  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
8496  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
8497 }
8498 </pre></p>
8499
8500 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
8501 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
8502 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
8503 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
8504 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
8505 Norway.</p>
8506
8507 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
8508 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
8509 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
8510 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
8511 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
8512 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
8513 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
8514 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
8515 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
8516 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
8517 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
8518 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
8519 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
8520 with patents, there is always
8521 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
8522 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
8523
8524 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
8525 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
8526 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
8527 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
8528 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
8529 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
8530 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
8531 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
8532 maintain such specification.</p>
8533
8534 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
8535 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
8536 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
8537 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
8538 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
8539 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
8540 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
8541 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
8542 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
8543 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
8544 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
8545 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
8546 provide the payment information.  There is also the
8547 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
8548 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
8549 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
8550 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
8551 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
8552 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
8553 sets.</p>
8554
8555       </div>
8556       <div class="tags">
8557
8558
8559         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>.
8560
8561
8562       </div>
8563     </div>
8564     <div class="padding"></div>
8565
8566     <div class="entry">
8567       <div class="title">
8568         <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>
8569       </div>
8570       <div class="date">
8571         15th March 2016
8572       </div>
8573       <div class="body">
8574         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
8575 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
8576 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
8577 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
8578 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
8579 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
8580 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
8581 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
8582 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
8583 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
8584 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
8585
8586 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
8587 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
8588 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
8589 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
8590 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
8591 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
8592 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
8593 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
8594 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
8595 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
8596 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
8597
8598 <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>
8599
8600 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
8601 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
8602 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
8603 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
8604 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
8605 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
8606
8607 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
8608 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
8609 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
8610 and graphing.</p>
8611
8612 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
8613 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
8614 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
8615 on
8616 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
8617 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
8618
8619       </div>
8620       <div class="tags">
8621
8622
8623         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8624
8625
8626       </div>
8627     </div>
8628     <div class="padding"></div>
8629
8630     <div class="entry">
8631       <div class="title">
8632         <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>
8633       </div>
8634       <div class="date">
8635         19th February 2016
8636       </div>
8637       <div class="body">
8638         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
8639 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
8640 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
8641 the code in the package in question, preferably in
8642 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
8643 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
8644
8645 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
8646 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
8647 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
8648 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
8649 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
8650 out what was wrong with
8651 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
8652 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
8653 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
8654 semi-automatically.</p>
8655
8656 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
8657 file based on the code in the source package,
8658 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
8659 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
8660 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
8661 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
8662 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
8663 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
8664 option in
8665 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
8666 blog posts from 2014</a>.
8667
8668 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
8669
8670 <p><pre>
8671 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
8672 </pre></p>
8673
8674 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
8675 this might not be the best option.</p>
8676
8677 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
8678 this approach in
8679 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
8680 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
8681 dpkg-copyright' option:
8682
8683 <p><pre>
8684 cme update dpkg-copyright
8685 </pre></p>
8686
8687 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
8688 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
8689
8690 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
8691 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
8692 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
8693 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
8694 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
8695 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
8696 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
8697 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
8698 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
8699 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
8700
8701 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
8702 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
8703 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
8704 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
8705
8706 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
8707 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
8708 planet.debian.org.</p>
8709
8710 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8711 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8712 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8713
8714 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
8715 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
8716
8717 <p><pre>
8718 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
8719   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
8720 </pre></p>
8721
8722 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
8723 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
8724 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
8725 with my packages in the future.</p>
8726
8727 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
8728 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
8729 command line.</p>
8730
8731       </div>
8732       <div class="tags">
8733
8734
8735         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8736
8737
8738       </div>
8739     </div>
8740     <div class="padding"></div>
8741
8742     <div class="entry">
8743       <div class="title">
8744         <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>
8745       </div>
8746       <div class="date">
8747          4th February 2016
8748       </div>
8749       <div class="body">
8750         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
8751 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
8752 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
8753 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
8754 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
8755 about. :)</p>
8756
8757 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
8758 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
8759 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
8760 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
8761 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
8762 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
8763
8764 <blockquote><pre>
8765 % apt install appstream
8766 [...]
8767 % apt update
8768 [...]
8769 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
8770   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
8771 firmware-qlogic
8772 %
8773 </pre></blockquote>
8774
8775 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
8776 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
8777 a way appstream can use.</p>
8778
8779 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
8780 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
8781 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
8782 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
8783 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
8784 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
8785
8786 <blockquote><pre>
8787 % apt install appstream
8788 [...]
8789 % apt update
8790 [...]
8791 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
8792   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
8793 bkchem
8794 phototonic
8795 inkscape
8796 shutter
8797 tetzle
8798 geeqie
8799 xia
8800 pinta
8801 gthumb
8802 karbon
8803 comix
8804 mirage
8805 viewnior
8806 postr
8807 ristretto
8808 kolourpaint4
8809 eog
8810 eom
8811 gimagereader
8812 midori
8813 %
8814 </pre></blockquote>
8815
8816 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
8817 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
8818
8819       </div>
8820       <div class="tags">
8821
8822
8823         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8824
8825
8826       </div>
8827     </div>
8828     <div class="padding"></div>
8829
8830     <div class="entry">
8831       <div class="title">
8832         <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>
8833       </div>
8834       <div class="date">
8835         24th January 2016
8836       </div>
8837       <div class="body">
8838         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
8839 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
8840 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
8841 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
8842 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
8843 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
8844 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
8845 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
8846 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
8847 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
8848 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
8849 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
8850 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
8851 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
8852 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
8853 entities.</p>
8854
8855 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
8856
8857 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
8858 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
8859 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
8860 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
8861 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
8862 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
8863 tool to do so is called
8864 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
8865 discovered it when I read
8866 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
8867 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
8868 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
8869 The python program was in Debian, but
8870 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
8871 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
8872 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
8873 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
8874 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
8875 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
8876 are now included
8877 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
8878
8879 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
8880 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
8881 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
8882 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
8883 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
8884 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
8885 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
8886 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
8887 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
8888 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
8889 about yourself with the services.</p>
8890
8891 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
8892 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
8893 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
8894 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
8895 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
8896 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
8897 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
8898 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
8899 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
8900 things.  A similar technique have been
8901 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
8902 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
8903 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
8904 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
8905 public.</p>
8906
8907 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
8908 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
8909 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
8910 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
8911
8912 <p>(I have uploaded
8913 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
8914 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
8915 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
8916
8917       </div>
8918       <div class="tags">
8919
8920
8921         Tags: <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>.
8922
8923
8924       </div>
8925     </div>
8926     <div class="padding"></div>
8927
8928     <div class="entry">
8929       <div class="title">
8930         <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>
8931       </div>
8932       <div class="date">
8933         15th January 2016
8934       </div>
8935       <div class="body">
8936         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
8937 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
8938 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
8939 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
8940 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
8941 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
8942 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
8943 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
8944 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
8945 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
8946 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
8947 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
8948 was not the first to propose this, as the
8949 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
8950 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
8951 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
8952 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
8953
8954 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
8955 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
8956 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
8957 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
8958 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
8959
8960 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
8961 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
8962 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
8963 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
8964 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
8965 done in /etc/.</p>
8966
8967 <blockquote><pre>
8968 apt install apt-transport-tor
8969 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
8970 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
8971 </pre></blockquote>
8972
8973 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
8974 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
8975 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
8976 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
8977
8978 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
8979 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
8980 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
8981 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
8982 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
8983 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
8984
8985 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
8986 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
8987 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
8988 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
8989 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
8990
8991 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
8992 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
8993 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
8994 system.</p>
8995
8996       </div>
8997       <div class="tags">
8998
8999
9000         Tags: <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>.
9001
9002
9003       </div>
9004     </div>
9005     <div class="padding"></div>
9006
9007     <div class="entry">
9008       <div class="title">
9009         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
9010       </div>
9011       <div class="date">
9012         23rd December 2015
9013       </div>
9014       <div class="body">
9015         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
9016 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
9017 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
9018 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
9019 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
9020 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
9021
9022 <p>A few days I came across
9023 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
9024 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
9025 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
9026 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
9027 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
9028 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
9029 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
9030 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
9031 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
9032 discovered the developer
9033 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
9034 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
9035 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
9036 archive.</p>
9037
9038 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
9039 it into Debian, where it currently
9040 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
9041 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
9042
9043 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
9044 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
9045 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
9046 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
9047 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
9048 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
9049 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
9050 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
9051 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
9052 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
9053 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
9054 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
9055
9056 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
9057 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
9058 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
9059 package show up in unstable.</p>
9060
9061       </div>
9062       <div class="tags">
9063
9064
9065         Tags: <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>.
9066
9067
9068       </div>
9069     </div>
9070     <div class="padding"></div>
9071
9072     <div class="entry">
9073       <div class="title">
9074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
9075       </div>
9076       <div class="date">
9077         20th December 2015
9078       </div>
9079       <div class="body">
9080         <p>Around three years ago, I created
9081 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
9082 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
9083 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
9084 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
9085 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
9086 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
9087 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
9088 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
9089 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
9090 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
9091 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
9092 with.</p>
9093
9094 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
9095 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
9096 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
9097 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
9098 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
9099 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
9100 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
9101 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
9102 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
9103 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
9104 Debian version of appstream.</p>
9105
9106 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
9107 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
9108 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
9109 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
9110 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
9111 how do add the required
9112 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
9113 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
9114 this content:</p>
9115
9116 <blockquote><pre>
9117 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
9118 &lt;component&gt;
9119   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
9120   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
9121   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
9122   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
9123   &lt;description&gt;
9124     &lt;p&gt;
9125       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
9126       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
9127       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
9128       launcher.
9129     &lt;/p&gt;
9130   &lt;/description&gt;
9131   &lt;provides&gt;
9132     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
9133   &lt;/provides&gt;
9134 &lt;/component&gt;
9135 </pre></blockquote>
9136
9137 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
9138 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
9139 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
9140 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
9141 0202.</p>
9142
9143 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
9144 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
9145 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
9146 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
9147 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
9148 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
9149 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
9150 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
9151
9152 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
9153 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
9154 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
9155 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
9156 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
9157
9158 <blockquote><pre>
9159 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
9160 </pre></blockquote>
9161
9162 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
9163 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
9164 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
9165 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
9166 question.</p>
9167
9168 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
9169 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
9170
9171 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
9172 try running this command on the command line:</p>
9173
9174 <blockquote><pre>
9175 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
9176 </pre></blockquote>
9177
9178 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
9179 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
9180 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
9181
9182       </div>
9183       <div class="tags">
9184
9185
9186         Tags: <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>.
9187
9188
9189       </div>
9190     </div>
9191     <div class="padding"></div>
9192
9193     <div class="entry">
9194       <div class="title">
9195         <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>
9196       </div>
9197       <div class="date">
9198         30th November 2015
9199       </div>
9200       <div class="body">
9201         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
9202 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
9203 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
9204 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
9205 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
9206
9207 <blockquote>
9208
9209 <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>
9210
9211 <blockquote>
9212 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
9213
9214 The first step is to choose a
9215 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
9216 code.<br/>
9217
9218 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
9219 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
9220
9221 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
9222 work<br/>
9223
9224 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
9225 </blockquote>
9226
9227 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
9228 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
9229 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
9230 0x57</a></small></p>
9231
9232 <p>As the Debian Website
9233 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
9234 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
9235 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
9236 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
9237 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
9238 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
9239 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
9240 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
9241 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
9242 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
9243 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
9244 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
9245 Freedom">FaiF</a>
9246 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
9247 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
9248 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
9249 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
9250 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
9251 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
9252 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
9253 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
9254 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
9255 In March the SFC supported a
9256 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
9257 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
9258 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
9259 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
9260 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
9261 conferences
9262 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
9263 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
9264 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
9265 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
9266 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
9267 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
9268 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
9269 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
9270 Software.</p>
9271
9272 <p>If you support Free Software,
9273 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
9274 what the SFC do, agree with their
9275 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
9276 principles</a>, are happy about their
9277 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
9278 work on a project that is an SFC
9279 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
9280 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
9281 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
9282 Allan Webber</a>,
9283 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
9284 Smith</a>,
9285 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
9286 Bacon</a>, myself and
9287 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
9288 becoming a
9289 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
9290 next week your donation will be
9291 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
9292 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
9293 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
9294 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
9295 social media accounts.</p>
9296
9297 </blockquote>
9298
9299 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
9300 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
9301 supporter too?</p>
9302
9303       </div>
9304       <div class="tags">
9305
9306
9307         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>.
9308
9309
9310       </div>
9311     </div>
9312     <div class="padding"></div>
9313
9314     <div class="entry">
9315       <div class="title">
9316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
9317       </div>
9318       <div class="date">
9319         17th November 2015
9320       </div>
9321       <div class="body">
9322         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
9323 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
9324 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
9325 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
9326 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
9327 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
9328 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
9329 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
9330 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
9331 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
9332
9333 <pre>
9334 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
9335       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
9336 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
9337 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
9338 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
9339 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
9340 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
9341 </pre>
9342
9343 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
9344 my old key.</p>
9345
9346 <p>If you signed my old key
9347 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
9348 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
9349 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
9350 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
9351
9352       </div>
9353       <div class="tags">
9354
9355
9356         Tags: <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>.
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/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
9366       </div>
9367       <div class="date">
9368          3rd November 2015
9369       </div>
9370       <div class="body">
9371         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
9372 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
9373 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
9374 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
9375 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
9376 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
9377 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
9378 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
9379 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
9380 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
9381 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
9382 journal entries .</p>
9383
9384 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
9385 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
9386 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
9387 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
9388 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
9389 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
9390 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
9391 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
9392 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
9393 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
9394 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
9395 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
9396 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
9397 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
9398 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
9399 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
9400 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
9401 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
9402 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
9403 ended,
9404 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
9405 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
9406 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
9407 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
9408 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
9409 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
9410 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
9411 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
9412 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
9413 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
9414 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
9415 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
9416 Geneva.</p>
9417
9418 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
9419 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
9420 over now.  This time
9421 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
9422 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
9423 receiver</a> and
9424 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
9425 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
9426 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
9427 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
9428 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
9429 different clause
9430 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
9431 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
9432 content of the document from the public because it contained
9433 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
9434 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
9435 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
9436 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
9437 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
9438 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
9439 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
9440 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
9441 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
9442 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
9443 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
9444
9445 <p>Armed with this
9446 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
9447 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
9448 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
9449 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
9450 the document.  According to
9451 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
9452 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
9453 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
9454 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
9455 the report initially and
9456 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
9457 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
9458 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
9459 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
9460 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
9461 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
9462 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
9463 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
9464 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
9465 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
9466 same person as the author of the document.</p>
9467
9468 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
9469 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
9470 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
9471 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
9472 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
9473 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
9474 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
9475 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
9476
9477 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
9478 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
9479
9480       </div>
9481       <div class="tags">
9482
9483
9484         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>.
9485
9486
9487       </div>
9488     </div>
9489     <div class="padding"></div>
9490
9491     <div class="entry">
9492       <div class="title">
9493         <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>
9494       </div>
9495       <div class="date">
9496         31st October 2015
9497       </div>
9498       <div class="body">
9499         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
9500 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
9501 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
9502 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
9503 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
9504 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
9505 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
9506 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
9507 get the book in different formats:</p>
9508
9509 <ul>
9510
9511   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
9512     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
9513
9514   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
9515     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
9516
9517   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
9518     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
9519
9520   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
9521     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
9522
9523 </ul>
9524
9525 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
9526 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
9527 have several problems according to
9528 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
9529 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
9530 create the book in various forms are available from
9531 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
9532 github project page</a>.</p>
9533
9534 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
9535 digi.no.  Check out the article
9536 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
9537 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
9538
9539 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
9540 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
9541 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
9542
9543       </div>
9544       <div class="tags">
9545
9546
9547         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>.
9548
9549
9550       </div>
9551     </div>
9552     <div class="padding"></div>
9553
9554     <div class="entry">
9555       <div class="title">
9556         <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>
9557       </div>
9558       <div class="date">
9559         23rd October 2015
9560       </div>
9561       <div class="body">
9562         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
9563 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
9564
9565 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
9566 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
9567 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
9568 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
9569 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
9570 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
9571 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
9572 would read it too.</p>
9573
9574 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
9575 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
9576 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
9577 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
9578 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
9579 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
9580 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
9581 this edition
9582 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
9583 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
9584 is the cover:
9585
9586 <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>
9587
9588 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
9589 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
9590 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
9591 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
9592 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
9593 need some proof reading.</p>
9594
9595 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
9596 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
9597 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
9598 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
9599 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
9600 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
9601 and
9602 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
9603 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
9604 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
9605 have available.</p>
9606
9607 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
9608 to secure some sponsoring from
9609 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
9610 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
9611 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
9612 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
9613 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
9614
9615       </div>
9616       <div class="tags">
9617
9618
9619         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>.
9620
9621
9622       </div>
9623     </div>
9624     <div class="padding"></div>
9625
9626     <div class="entry">
9627       <div class="title">
9628         <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>
9629       </div>
9630       <div class="date">
9631         19th October 2015
9632       </div>
9633       <div class="body">
9634         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
9635 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
9636 one hour interview was
9637 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
9638 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
9639 place 2014-10-20.</p>
9640
9641 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
9642 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
9643 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
9644
9645 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
9646
9647 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
9648 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
9649 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
9650 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
9651 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
9652 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
9653 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
9654 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
9655
9656       </div>
9657       <div class="tags">
9658
9659
9660         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>.
9661
9662
9663       </div>
9664     </div>
9665     <div class="padding"></div>
9666
9667     <div class="entry">
9668       <div class="title">
9669         <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>
9670       </div>
9671       <div class="date">
9672          8th October 2015
9673       </div>
9674       <div class="body">
9675         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
9676 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
9677 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
9678 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
9679 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
9680 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
9681 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
9682 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
9683 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
9684 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
9685 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
9686 weep.</p>
9687
9688 <p>The movie is also available on
9689 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
9690 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
9691 my parents.</p>
9692
9693       </div>
9694       <div class="tags">
9695
9696
9697         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>.
9698
9699
9700       </div>
9701     </div>
9702     <div class="padding"></div>
9703
9704     <div class="entry">
9705       <div class="title">
9706         <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>
9707       </div>
9708       <div class="date">
9709          1st October 2015
9710       </div>
9711       <div class="body">
9712         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
9713 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
9714 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
9715 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
9716 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
9717 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
9718 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
9719 French translation available from the
9720 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
9721 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
9722 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
9723 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
9724 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
9725 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
9726 edition, check out
9727 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
9728 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
9729 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
9730 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
9731
9732       </div>
9733       <div class="tags">
9734
9735
9736         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>.
9737
9738
9739       </div>
9740     </div>
9741     <div class="padding"></div>
9742
9743     <div class="entry">
9744       <div class="title">
9745         <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>
9746       </div>
9747       <div class="date">
9748         24th September 2015
9749       </div>
9750       <div class="body">
9751         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
9752 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
9753 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
9754 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
9755 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
9756 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
9757 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
9758
9759 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
9760
9761 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
9762 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
9763 by someone else.  I found
9764 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
9765 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
9766 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
9767 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
9768 from him.  Via
9769 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
9770 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
9771 discovered
9772 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
9773 available in Debian.</p>
9774
9775 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
9776 battery stats ever since. Now my
9777 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
9778 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
9779 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
9780 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
9781
9782 <pre>
9783 #!/bin/sh
9784 # Inspired by
9785 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
9786 # See also
9787 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
9788 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
9789
9790 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
9791     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
9792
9793 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
9794     (
9795         printf "timestamp,"
9796         for f in $files; do
9797             printf "%s," $f
9798         done
9799         echo
9800     ) > "$logfile"
9801 fi
9802
9803 log_battery() {
9804     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
9805     # when several log processes run in parallel.
9806     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
9807         for f in $files; do \
9808             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
9809         done)
9810     echo "$msg"
9811 }
9812
9813 cd /sys/class/power_supply
9814
9815 for bat in BAT*; do
9816     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
9817 done
9818 </pre>
9819
9820 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
9821 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
9822 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
9823 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
9824 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
9825 The code for the Debian package
9826 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
9827 available on github</a>.</p>
9828
9829 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
9830
9831 <pre>
9832 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
9833 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
9834 [...]
9835 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
9836 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
9837 </pre>
9838
9839 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
9840 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
9841 battery.</p>
9842
9843 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
9844 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
9845 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
9846 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
9847 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
9848 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
9849 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
9850 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
9851 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
9852 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
9853 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
9854 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
9855 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
9856 Linux too.</p>
9857
9858 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
9859 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
9860 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
9861 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
9862 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
9863 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
9864 load).</p>
9865
9866 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
9867 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
9868 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
9869 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
9870 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
9871 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
9872 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
9873 those.</p>
9874
9875 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
9876 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
9877 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
9878 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
9879 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
9880 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
9881 specific.</p>
9882
9883       </div>
9884       <div class="tags">
9885
9886
9887         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9888
9889
9890       </div>
9891     </div>
9892     <div class="padding"></div>
9893
9894     <div class="entry">
9895       <div class="title">
9896         <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>
9897       </div>
9898       <div class="date">
9899          3rd September 2015
9900       </div>
9901       <div class="body">
9902         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
9903 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
9904 the
9905 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
9906 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
9907 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
9908 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
9909
9910 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
9911 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
9912 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
9913 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
9914 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
9915 version.  Not only did he create a
9916 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
9917 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
9918 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
9919 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
9920 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
9921 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
9922 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
9923 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
9924 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
9925 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
9926
9927 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
9928 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
9929 current english version look like this:</p>
9930
9931 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
9932
9933 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
9934 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
9935 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
9936 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
9937 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
9938
9939 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
9940 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
9941 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
9942 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
9943 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
9944 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
9945
9946       </div>
9947       <div class="tags">
9948
9949
9950         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>.
9951
9952
9953       </div>
9954     </div>
9955     <div class="padding"></div>
9956
9957     <div class="entry">
9958       <div class="title">
9959         <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>
9960       </div>
9961       <div class="date">
9962         19th August 2015
9963       </div>
9964       <div class="body">
9965         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
9966 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
9967 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
9968 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
9969 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
9970 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
9971 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
9972 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
9973 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
9974 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
9975 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
9976 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
9977 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
9978 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
9979 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
9980 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
9981 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
9982
9983 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
9984 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
9985 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
9986 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
9987 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
9988 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
9989
9990       </div>
9991       <div class="tags">
9992
9993
9994         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>.
9995
9996
9997       </div>
9998     </div>
9999     <div class="padding"></div>
10000
10001     <div class="entry">
10002       <div class="title">
10003         <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>
10004       </div>
10005       <div class="date">
10006          9th August 2015
10007       </div>
10008       <div class="body">
10009         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
10010 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
10011 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
10012 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
10013 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
10014 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
10015 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
10016 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
10017 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
10018
10019 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
10020 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
10021 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
10022 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
10023 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
10024
10025 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
10026 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
10027 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
10028 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
10029 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
10030 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
10031
10032 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
10033 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
10034 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
10035 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
10036 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
10037 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
10038 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
10039 bring the prize down further.</p>
10040
10041 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
10042 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
10043 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
10044 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
10045 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
10046 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
10047 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
10048 to the task.</p>
10049
10050 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
10051 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
10052 status can as usual be found on
10053 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
10054 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
10055 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
10056 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
10057 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
10058 formatting.</p>
10059
10060 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
10061 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
10062 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
10063 result in a few months.</p>
10064
10065       </div>
10066       <div class="tags">
10067
10068
10069         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>.
10070
10071
10072       </div>
10073     </div>
10074     <div class="padding"></div>
10075
10076     <div class="entry">
10077       <div class="title">
10078         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
10079       </div>
10080       <div class="date">
10081         16th July 2015
10082       </div>
10083       <div class="body">
10084         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
10085 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
10086 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
10087 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
10088 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
10089 chapter.  Based on the
10090 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
10091 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
10092 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
10093 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
10094 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
10095 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
10096 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
10097 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
10098
10099 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
10100 and add this text there:</p>
10101
10102 <pre>
10103 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
10104 </pre>
10105
10106 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
10107 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
10108 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
10109
10110 <pre>
10111 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
10112 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
10113   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
10114     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
10115 \usepackage{endnotes}
10116 \let\footnote=\endnote
10117 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
10118 \begin{document}
10119     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
10120   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
10121 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
10122 </pre>
10123
10124 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
10125 this:</p>
10126
10127 <pre>
10128 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
10129 </pre>
10130
10131 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
10132 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
10133 book project</a> is located.</p>
10134
10135       </div>
10136       <div class="tags">
10137
10138
10139         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>.
10140
10141
10142       </div>
10143     </div>
10144     <div class="padding"></div>
10145
10146     <div class="entry">
10147       <div class="title">
10148         <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>
10149       </div>
10150       <div class="date">
10151          7th July 2015
10152       </div>
10153       <div class="body">
10154         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
10155 <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
10156 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
10157 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
10158 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
10159 does not.</p>
10160
10161 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
10162 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
10163 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
10164 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
10165
10166 <p><blockquote>
10167
10168 <p>According to
10169 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
10170 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
10171 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
10172 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
10173 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
10174 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
10175
10176 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
10177 PDF named
10178 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
10179 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
10180 fees:</p>
10181
10182 <ul>
10183  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
10184   <ul>
10185    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
10186      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
10187      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
10188      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
10189
10190    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
10191      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
10192   </ul></li>
10193
10194  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
10195   <ul>
10196    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
10197      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
10198      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
10199
10200    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
10201      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
10202   </ul></li>
10203 </ul>
10204
10205 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
10206 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
10207 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
10208 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
10209 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
10210 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
10211
10212 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
10213 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
10214 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
10215 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
10216 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
10217 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
10218 access to personalized services?</p>
10219
10220 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
10221 Internet.</p>
10222 </blockquote></p>
10223
10224 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
10225 with the MPEG LA:</p>
10226
10227 <p><blockquote>
10228 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
10229 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
10230
10231 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
10232 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
10233 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
10234 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
10235 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
10236 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
10237 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
10238
10239 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
10240 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
10241 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
10242 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
10243 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
10244 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
10245 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
10246 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
10247 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
10248 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
10249 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
10250 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
10251
10252 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
10253 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
10254 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
10255 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
10256 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
10257 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
10258 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
10259
10260 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
10261 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
10262 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
10263 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
10264
10265 <p>For your reference, I have attached
10266 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
10267 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
10268 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
10269 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
10270 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
10271 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
10272 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
10273 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
10274 be used for execution.</p>
10275
10276 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
10277 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
10278 free to contact me directly.</p>
10279 </blockquote></p>
10280
10281 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
10282 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
10283 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
10284 But I still had a few questions:</p>
10285
10286 <p><blockquote>
10287 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
10288 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
10289 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
10290 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
10291 typically look similar to this:
10292
10293 <p><blockquote>
10294   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
10295   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
10296   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
10297   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
10298   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
10299   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
10300   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
10301   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
10302 </blockquote></p>
10303
10304 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
10305 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
10306 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
10307 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
10308 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
10309 </blockquote></p>
10310
10311 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
10312 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
10313
10314 <p><blockquote>
10315
10316 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
10317 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
10318 reads:</p>
10319
10320 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
10321 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
10322 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
10323 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
10324 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
10325 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
10326 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
10327 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
10328
10329 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
10330 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
10331 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
10332 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
10333 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
10334 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
10335 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
10336 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
10337
10338 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
10339 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
10340 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
10341 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
10342 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
10343 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
10344 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
10345 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
10346 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
10347
10348 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
10349 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
10350 Norway.</p>
10351
10352 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
10353 assistance, just let me know.</p>
10354 </blockquote></p>
10355
10356 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
10357 asked for more information:</p>
10358
10359 <p><blockquote>
10360
10361 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
10362 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
10363 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
10364 list available from &lt;URL:
10365 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
10366 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
10367 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
10368 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
10369 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
10370
10371 </blockquote></p>
10372
10373 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
10374 in that list:</p>
10375
10376 <p><blockquote>
10377
10378 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
10379 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
10380 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
10381 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
10382 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
10383 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
10384 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
10385 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
10386 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
10387
10388 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
10389 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
10390 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
10391 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
10392 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
10393 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
10394 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
10395 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
10396 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
10397 Portfolio Patents.</p>
10398 </blockquote></p>
10399
10400 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
10401 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
10402 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
10403 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
10404 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
10405 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
10406 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
10407 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
10408 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
10409
10410       </div>
10411       <div class="tags">
10412
10413
10414         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>.
10415
10416
10417       </div>
10418     </div>
10419     <div class="padding"></div>
10420
10421     <div class="entry">
10422       <div class="title">
10423         <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>
10424       </div>
10425       <div class="date">
10426          5th July 2015
10427       </div>
10428       <div class="body">
10429         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
10430 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
10431 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
10432 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
10433 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
10434 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
10435 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
10436 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
10437 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
10438 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
10439 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
10440
10441 <p>One tip I got was to use the
10442 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
10443 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
10444 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
10445 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
10446 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
10447 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
10448
10449 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
10450 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
10451 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
10452 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
10453 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
10454 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
10455 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
10456 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
10457 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
10458 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
10459 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
10460 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
10461 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
10462 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
10463 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
10464
10465 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
10466 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
10467 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
10468 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
10469
10470 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
10471 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
10472
10473 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
10474 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
10475 different
10476 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
10477 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
10478
10479       </div>
10480       <div class="tags">
10481
10482
10483         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10484
10485
10486       </div>
10487     </div>
10488     <div class="padding"></div>
10489
10490     <div class="entry">
10491       <div class="title">
10492         <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>
10493       </div>
10494       <div class="date">
10495          3rd July 2015
10496       </div>
10497       <div class="body">
10498         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
10499 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
10500 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
10501 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
10502 flickering.</p>
10503
10504 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
10505 still as
10506 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
10507 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
10508 good help from
10509 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
10510 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
10511 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
10512 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
10513 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
10514 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
10515 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
10516 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
10517 deteriorated since X41.</p>
10518
10519 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
10520 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
10521 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
10522 have suggestions.</p>
10523
10524 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
10525 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
10526 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
10527
10528       </div>
10529       <div class="tags">
10530
10531
10532         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10533
10534
10535       </div>
10536     </div>
10537     <div class="padding"></div>
10538
10539     <div class="entry">
10540       <div class="title">
10541         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
10542       </div>
10543       <div class="date">
10544          2nd July 2015
10545       </div>
10546       <div class="body">
10547         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
10548 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
10549 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
10550 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
10551 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
10552 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
10553 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
10554 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
10555 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
10556 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
10557 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
10558 Youtube too</a>.</p>
10559
10560 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
10561 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
10562 pages</a> to view them.</p>
10563
10564 <ul>
10565
10566   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
10567       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
10568
10569   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
10570
10571   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
10572       (Olav Helland)</li>
10573
10574   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
10575       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
10576
10577   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
10578
10579   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
10580
10581   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
10582       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
10583
10584   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
10585
10586   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
10587
10588   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
10589
10590   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
10591
10592   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
10593       Sevens)</li>
10594
10595   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
10596       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
10597
10598   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
10599       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
10600
10601   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
10602       Dyvik)</li>
10603
10604   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
10605
10606 </ul>
10607
10608 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
10609 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
10610 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
10611 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
10612 which sent me on a detour to
10613 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
10614 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
10615 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
10616
10617       </div>
10618       <div class="tags">
10619
10620
10621         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>.
10622
10623
10624       </div>
10625     </div>
10626     <div class="padding"></div>
10627
10628     <div class="entry">
10629       <div class="title">
10630         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
10631       </div>
10632       <div class="date">
10633         15th June 2015
10634       </div>
10635       <div class="body">
10636         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
10637 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
10638 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
10639 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
10640 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
10641 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
10642 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
10643 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
10644 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
10645
10646 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
10647 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
10648 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
10649 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
10650
10651 <pre>
10652 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
10653
10654 real    0m2.841s
10655 user    0m0.184s
10656 sys     0m0.036s
10657 %
10658 </pre>
10659
10660 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
10661 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
10662 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
10663 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
10664 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
10665
10666 <pre>
10667 digraph ownership {
10668 rankdir = LR;
10669 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
10670 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
10671 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
10672 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
10673 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
10674 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
10675 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
10676 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
10677 }
10678 </pre>
10679
10680 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
10681 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
10682 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
10683
10684 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
10685
10686 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
10687 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
10688 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
10689 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
10690 of the ownership links.</p>
10691
10692 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
10693 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
10694
10695 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
10696 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
10697 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
10698 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
10699 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
10700 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
10701 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
10702
10703       </div>
10704       <div class="tags">
10705
10706
10707         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
10708
10709
10710       </div>
10711     </div>
10712     <div class="padding"></div>
10713
10714     <div class="entry">
10715       <div class="title">
10716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
10717       </div>
10718       <div class="date">
10719         11th June 2015
10720       </div>
10721       <div class="body">
10722         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
10723 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
10724 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
10725 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
10726 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
10727 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
10728 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
10729 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
10730 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
10731 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
10732 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
10733 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
10734 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
10735
10736 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
10737 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
10738 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
10739 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
10740 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
10741 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
10742 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
10743 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
10744 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
10745 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
10746
10747 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
10748 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
10749 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
10750 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
10751 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
10752 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
10753 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
10754 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
10755 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
10756
10757 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
10758 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
10759 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
10760 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
10761 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
10762 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
10763 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
10764 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
10765 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
10766 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
10767 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
10768
10769       </div>
10770       <div class="tags">
10771
10772
10773         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>.
10774
10775
10776       </div>
10777     </div>
10778     <div class="padding"></div>
10779
10780     <div class="entry">
10781       <div class="title">
10782         <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>
10783       </div>
10784       <div class="date">
10785         10th May 2015
10786       </div>
10787       <div class="body">
10788         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
10789 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
10790 criminal or not, are
10791 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
10792 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
10793 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
10794 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
10795 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
10796 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
10797 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
10798 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
10799 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
10800 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
10801 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
10802 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
10803 the police.</p>
10804
10805 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
10806 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
10807 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
10808 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
10809 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
10810 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
10811 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
10812 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
10813 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
10814 is good to know that
10815 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
10816 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
10817 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
10818 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
10819 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
10820 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
10821 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
10822 business getting access to that information.</p>
10823
10824 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
10825 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
10826 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
10827 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
10828 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
10829 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
10830 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
10831
10832 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
10833 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
10834 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
10835 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
10836
10837 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
10838 really could make such decision, I wrote
10839 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
10840 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
10841 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
10842
10843       </div>
10844       <div class="tags">
10845
10846
10847         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>.
10848
10849
10850       </div>
10851     </div>
10852     <div class="padding"></div>
10853
10854     <div class="entry">
10855       <div class="title">
10856         <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>
10857       </div>
10858       <div class="date">
10859          1st May 2015
10860       </div>
10861       <div class="body">
10862         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
10863 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
10864 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
10865 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
10866 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
10867 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
10868 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
10869
10870 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
10871 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
10872 the 2012 numbers are from
10873 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
10874 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
10875 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
10876 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
10877 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
10878
10879 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
10880 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
10881 enough.  See for example a
10882 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
10883 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
10884 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
10885 to get the storage requirements.</p>
10886
10887 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
10888 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
10889 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
10890 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
10891 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
10892
10893 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
10894 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
10895 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
10896 and large organisations:</p>
10897
10898 <table border="1">
10899 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
10900 <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>
10901 <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>
10902 <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>
10903 </table>
10904
10905 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
10906 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
10907 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
10908 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
10909 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
10910 collecting the data?</p>
10911
10912       </div>
10913       <div class="tags">
10914
10915
10916         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>.
10917
10918
10919       </div>
10920     </div>
10921     <div class="padding"></div>
10922
10923     <div class="entry">
10924       <div class="title">
10925         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
10926       </div>
10927       <div class="date">
10928         26th April 2015
10929       </div>
10930       <div class="body">
10931         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
10932 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
10933 announcement today</a>:</p>
10934
10935 <pre>
10936 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
10937 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
10938 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
10939 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
10940
10941 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
10942 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
10943 later today ;)
10944
10945 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
10946 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
10947 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
10948 be possible and encouraged!
10949
10950 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
10951 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
10952
10953 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
10954 operating system for schools, universities and other
10955 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
10956 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
10957 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
10958 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
10959 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
10960 days.
10961
10962 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
10963 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
10964 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
10965 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
10966
10967 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
10968 installation instructions are available, including detailed
10969 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
10970 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
10971 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
10972 least 5 characters!
10973
10974 == Where to download ==
10975
10976 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
10977 can be downloaded at the following locations:
10978
10979     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
10980     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
10981
10982 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
10983
10984 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
10985 available, with more software included (saving additional download
10986 time):
10987
10988     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
10989     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
10990
10991 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
10992
10993 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
10994 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
10995 options.
10996
10997 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
10998
10999 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
11000 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
11001
11002 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
11003 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
11004 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
11005 online version of the translated manual.
11006
11007 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
11008 release notes and the installation manual:
11009 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
11010 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
11011
11012
11013 == Errata / known problems ==
11014
11015     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
11016     DHCP (#780461).
11017
11018     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
11019
11020 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
11021 hostname immediately.
11022
11023 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
11024 more current and complete list.
11025
11026 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
11027
11028 === Software updates ===
11029
11030 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
11031
11032  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
11033    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
11034    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
11035
11036  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
11037    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
11038    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
11039    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
11040      the others see the manual.
11041  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
11042  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
11043  * GOsa 2.7.4
11044  * LTSP 5.5.4
11045  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
11046  * new boot framework: systemd
11047  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
11048  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
11049  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
11050  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
11051  * golearn 0.9
11052  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
11053  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
11054  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
11055  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
11056    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
11057
11058 === Installation changes ===
11059
11060     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
11061     for the hardware present.
11062
11063 === Fixed bugs ===
11064
11065 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
11066 from a user perspective:
11067
11068  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
11069    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
11070    information is corrected (710362)
11071
11072  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
11073
11074 === Sugar desktop removed ===
11075
11076 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
11077 available in Debian Edu jessie.
11078
11079
11080 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
11081
11082 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
11083 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11084 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
11085 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11086 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11087 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11088 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
11089 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
11090 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
11091 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
11092 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
11093 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
11094 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
11095 environment.
11096
11097 == About Debian ==
11098
11099 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
11100 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
11101 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
11102 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
11103 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
11104 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
11105 operating system.
11106
11107 == Thanks ==
11108
11109 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
11110 You rock.
11111 </pre>
11112
11113       </div>
11114       <div class="tags">
11115
11116
11117         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11118
11119
11120       </div>
11121     </div>
11122     <div class="padding"></div>
11123
11124     <div class="entry">
11125       <div class="title">
11126         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
11127       </div>
11128       <div class="date">
11129         15th April 2015
11130       </div>
11131       <div class="body">
11132         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
11133 computer system for schools I've involved in,
11134 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
11135 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
11136 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
11137 Agarwal.</p>
11138
11139 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11140
11141 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
11142 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
11143 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
11144 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
11145 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
11146 few software start-ups as well.</p>
11147
11148 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11149 project?</strong></p>
11150
11151 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
11152 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
11153 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
11154 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
11155 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
11156 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
11157 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
11158
11159 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11160 Edu?</strong></p>
11161
11162 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
11163 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
11164 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
11165 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
11166 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
11167 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
11168 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
11169 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
11170
11171 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
11172 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
11173 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
11174 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
11175 for the developer per-se.</p>
11176
11177 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11178 Edu?</strong></p>
11179
11180 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
11181 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
11182 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
11183
11184 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
11185 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
11186 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
11187 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
11188 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
11189 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
11190 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
11191
11192 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
11193 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
11194 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
11195
11196 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
11197 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
11198 interactive manner. While sites such as the
11199 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
11200 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
11201 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
11202 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
11203 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
11204 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
11205 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
11206 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
11207 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
11208 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
11209 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
11210
11211 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
11212 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
11213 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
11214 also be used.</p>
11215
11216 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
11217 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
11218 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
11219 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
11220 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
11221 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
11222 the user's input.</p>
11223
11224 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
11225 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
11226 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
11227 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
11228 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
11229 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
11230 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
11231 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
11232
11233 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
11234 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
11235 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
11236 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
11237 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
11238 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
11239 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
11240 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
11241
11242 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11243
11244 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
11245 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
11246 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
11247 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
11248 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
11249
11250 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11251 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11252
11253 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
11254 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
11255 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
11256 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
11257 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
11258 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
11259
11260 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
11261 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
11262 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
11263 well.</p>
11264
11265 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
11266 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
11267 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
11268 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
11269
11270 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
11271 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
11272 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
11273 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
11274 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
11275 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
11276 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
11277 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
11278 releases.</p>
11279
11280 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
11281 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
11282 is aimed at.
11283
11284 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
11285 around 2 years, and
11286 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
11287 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
11288 there was :</p>
11289
11290 <ol>
11291
11292   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
11293    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
11294    portion/syllabus given.</li>
11295
11296   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
11297    is in the syllabus.</li>
11298
11299   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
11300    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
11301    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
11302    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
11303    as recognizable as say a
11304    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
11305    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
11306    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
11307    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
11308    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
11309    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
11310
11311 </ol>
11312
11313       </div>
11314       <div class="tags">
11315
11316
11317         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11318
11319
11320       </div>
11321     </div>
11322     <div class="padding"></div>
11323
11324     <div class="entry">
11325       <div class="title">
11326         <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>
11327       </div>
11328       <div class="date">
11329          7th April 2015
11330       </div>
11331       <div class="body">
11332         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
11333 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
11334 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
11335
11336 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
11337 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
11338 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
11339 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
11340 part of my involvement with the
11341 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
11342 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
11343 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
11344 Hackathon with our friends
11345 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
11346 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
11347 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
11348 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
11349
11350 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
11351 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
11352
11353       </div>
11354       <div class="tags">
11355
11356
11357         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>.
11358
11359
11360       </div>
11361     </div>
11362     <div class="padding"></div>
11363
11364     <div class="entry">
11365       <div class="title">
11366         <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>
11367       </div>
11368       <div class="date">
11369          4th April 2015
11370       </div>
11371       <div class="body">
11372         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
11373 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
11374 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
11375 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
11376 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
11377 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
11378 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
11379 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
11380 project pages.  You can also check out the
11381 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
11382 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
11383 and HTML version available in the
11384 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
11385 directory</a>.</p>
11386
11387 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
11388 you find any.</p>
11389
11390       </div>
11391       <div class="tags">
11392
11393
11394         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>.
11395
11396
11397       </div>
11398     </div>
11399     <div class="padding"></div>
11400
11401     <div class="entry">
11402       <div class="title">
11403         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
11404       </div>
11405       <div class="date">
11406          9th March 2015
11407       </div>
11408       <div class="body">
11409         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
11410 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
11411 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
11412 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
11413 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
11414 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
11415 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
11416 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
11417 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
11418 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
11419 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
11420 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
11421 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
11422 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
11423
11424 <p>The list of NUUG videos
11425 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
11426 include things like a
11427 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
11428 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
11429 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
11430 re-implementation</a>, the
11431 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
11432 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
11433 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
11434 video</A> and many others.</p>
11435
11436 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
11437 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
11438 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
11439 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
11440 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
11441 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
11442 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
11443 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
11444 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
11445 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
11446
11447 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
11448 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
11449 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
11450 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
11451 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
11452 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
11453 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
11454 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
11455 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
11456 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
11457
11458       </div>
11459       <div class="tags">
11460
11461
11462         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>.
11463
11464
11465       </div>
11466     </div>
11467     <div class="padding"></div>
11468
11469     <div class="entry">
11470       <div class="title">
11471         <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>
11472       </div>
11473       <div class="date">
11474         28th February 2015
11475       </div>
11476       <div class="body">
11477         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
11478 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
11479 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
11480 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
11481 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
11482 made for
11483 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
11484 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
11485 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
11486 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
11487 a friend have
11488 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
11489 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
11490 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
11491 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
11492 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
11493 it happen ourselves.
11494 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
11495 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
11496 is.</p>
11497
11498 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
11499 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
11500
11501       </div>
11502       <div class="tags">
11503
11504
11505         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>.
11506
11507
11508       </div>
11509     </div>
11510     <div class="padding"></div>
11511
11512     <div class="entry">
11513       <div class="title">
11514         <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>
11515       </div>
11516       <div class="date">
11517         25th February 2015
11518       </div>
11519       <div class="body">
11520         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
11521 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
11522 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
11523 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
11524 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
11525 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
11526 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
11527 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
11528 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
11529 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
11530 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
11531 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
11532 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
11533 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
11534 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
11535 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
11536 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
11537
11538 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
11539 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
11540 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
11541 with VLC.</p>
11542
11543 <ul>
11544   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
11545   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
11546 </ul>
11547
11548 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
11549 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
11550 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
11551 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
11552 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
11553 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
11554 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
11555
11556 <blockquote><pre>
11557 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
11558  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
11559  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
11560 </pre></blockquote>
11561
11562 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
11563 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
11564 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
11565 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
11566
11567       </div>
11568       <div class="tags">
11569
11570
11571         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>.
11572
11573
11574       </div>
11575     </div>
11576     <div class="padding"></div>
11577
11578     <div class="entry">
11579       <div class="title">
11580         <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>
11581       </div>
11582       <div class="date">
11583         10th February 2015
11584       </div>
11585       <div class="body">
11586         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
11587 that
11588 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
11589 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
11590 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
11591 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
11592 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
11593 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
11594 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
11595 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
11596 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
11597 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
11598 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
11599 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
11600 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
11601 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
11602 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
11603
11604 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
11605 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
11606 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
11607 controversy about these scanners.</p>
11608
11609 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
11610 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
11611 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
11612
11613       </div>
11614       <div class="tags">
11615
11616
11617         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>.
11618
11619
11620       </div>
11621     </div>
11622     <div class="padding"></div>
11623
11624     <div class="entry">
11625       <div class="title">
11626         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
11627       </div>
11628       <div class="date">
11629          8th February 2015
11630       </div>
11631       <div class="body">
11632         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
11633 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
11634 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
11635 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
11636 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
11637 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
11638 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
11639 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
11640 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
11641 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
11642 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
11643 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
11644
11645 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
11646 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
11647 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
11648 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
11649
11650 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
11651 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
11652 distribute the TV content.  The
11653 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
11654 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
11655 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
11656 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
11657 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
11658 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
11659 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
11660 following activity, we now have the schedule
11661 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
11662 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
11663 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
11664 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
11665
11666 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
11667 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
11668 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
11669 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
11670 streams are working as they should.</p>
11671
11672       </div>
11673       <div class="tags">
11674
11675
11676         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>.
11677
11678
11679       </div>
11680     </div>
11681     <div class="padding"></div>
11682
11683     <div class="entry">
11684       <div class="title">
11685         <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>
11686       </div>
11687       <div class="date">
11688         12th January 2015
11689       </div>
11690       <div class="body">
11691         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
11692 Foundation</a> announced a new video
11693 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
11694 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
11695 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
11696 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
11697 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
11698 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
11699
11700 <p>But today I was told that
11701 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
11702 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
11703 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
11704 available in
11705 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
11706 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
11707 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
11708
11709 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
11710 Libreplanet
11711 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
11712 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
11713
11714       </div>
11715       <div class="tags">
11716
11717
11718         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>.
11719
11720
11721       </div>
11722     </div>
11723     <div class="padding"></div>
11724
11725     <div class="entry">
11726       <div class="title">
11727         <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>
11728       </div>
11729       <div class="date">
11730         30th December 2014
11731       </div>
11732       <div class="body">
11733         <p>I am very happy that we in the
11734 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
11735 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
11736 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
11737 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
11738 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
11739 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
11740 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
11741 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
11742 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
11743 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
11744
11745 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
11746 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
11747 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
11748 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
11749 reports in public.</p>
11750
11751       </div>
11752       <div class="tags">
11753
11754
11755         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>.
11756
11757
11758       </div>
11759     </div>
11760     <div class="padding"></div>
11761
11762     <div class="entry">
11763       <div class="title">
11764         <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>
11765       </div>
11766       <div class="date">
11767         19th December 2014
11768       </div>
11769       <div class="body">
11770         <p>So, Sony caved in
11771 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
11772 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
11773 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
11774 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
11775 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
11776 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
11777 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
11778 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
11779 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
11780 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
11781 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
11782 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
11783 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
11784
11785 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
11786 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
11787 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
11788 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
11789
11790 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
11791 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
11792 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
11793 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
11794 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
11795 income. :)</p>
11796
11797       </div>
11798       <div class="tags">
11799
11800
11801         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>.
11802
11803
11804       </div>
11805     </div>
11806     <div class="padding"></div>
11807
11808     <div class="entry">
11809       <div class="title">
11810         <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>
11811       </div>
11812       <div class="date">
11813         22nd November 2014
11814       </div>
11815       <div class="body">
11816         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
11817 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
11818 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
11819 courtesy of
11820 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
11821 Schubert</a> and
11822 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
11823 McVittie</a>.
11824
11825 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
11826 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
11827 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
11828 you upgrade:</p>
11829
11830 <p><blockquote><pre>
11831 Package: systemd-sysv
11832 Pin: release o=Debian
11833 Pin-Priority: -1
11834 </pre></blockquote><p>
11835
11836 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
11837 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
11838 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
11839 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
11840 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
11841
11842 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
11843 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
11844 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
11845 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
11846 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
11847 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
11848
11849 <p><blockquote><pre>
11850 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
11851 </pre></blockquote><p>
11852
11853 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
11854
11855 <p><blockquote><pre>
11856 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
11857 </pre></blockquote><p>
11858
11859 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
11860 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
11861
11862 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
11863 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
11864 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
11865 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
11866 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
11867 Jessie is released.</p>
11868
11869 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
11870 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
11871 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
11872 line.</p>
11873
11874       </div>
11875       <div class="tags">
11876
11877
11878         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>.
11879
11880
11881       </div>
11882     </div>
11883     <div class="padding"></div>
11884
11885     <div class="entry">
11886       <div class="title">
11887         <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>
11888       </div>
11889       <div class="date">
11890         10th November 2014
11891       </div>
11892       <div class="body">
11893         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
11894 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
11895 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
11896
11897 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
11898 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
11899 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
11900 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
11901 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
11902 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
11903 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
11904 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
11905 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
11906 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
11907 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
11908 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
11909 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
11910 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
11911 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
11912
11913 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
11914 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
11915 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
11916 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
11917 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
11918 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
11919 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
11920 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
11921 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
11922 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
11923 were fairly easy, and
11924 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
11925 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
11926 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
11927 useful approach.</p>
11928
11929 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
11930 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
11931 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
11932 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
11933 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
11934 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
11935 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
11936 this:</p>
11937
11938 <p><blockquote><pre>
11939 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
11940   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
11941 </pre></blockquote></p>
11942
11943 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
11944 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
11945
11946 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
11947 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
11948 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
11949 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
11950 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
11951 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
11952 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
11953 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
11954 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
11955 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
11956 system.</p>
11957
11958 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
11959 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
11960 SMTorP. :)</p>
11961
11962       </div>
11963       <div class="tags">
11964
11965
11966         Tags: <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>.
11967
11968
11969       </div>
11970     </div>
11971     <div class="padding"></div>
11972
11973     <div class="entry">
11974       <div class="title">
11975         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
11976       </div>
11977       <div class="date">
11978         27th October 2014
11979       </div>
11980       <div class="body">
11981         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
11982 sent out
11983 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
11984 announcement</a>:</p>
11985
11986 <pre>
11987 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
11988 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
11989
11990 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
11991 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
11992 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
11993 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
11994 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
11995 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
11996 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
11997
11998 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
11999 installation instructions are available, including detailed
12000 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
12001 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
12002 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
12003 of at least 5 characters!
12004
12005  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
12006
12007 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
12008 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
12009 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
12010 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
12011 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
12012
12013 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
12014 mostly in Germany and Norway.
12015
12016 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
12017 ===============================
12018
12019 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
12020 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
12021 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
12022 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
12023 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
12024 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
12025 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
12026 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
12027 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
12028 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
12029 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
12030 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
12031 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
12032 environment.
12033
12034  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
12035  [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;
12036
12037 Full release notes and manual
12038 =============================
12039
12040 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
12041 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
12042 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
12043 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
12044 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
12045
12046  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
12047  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
12048
12049 Where to get it
12050 ---------------
12051
12052 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
12053
12054  * <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>
12055  * <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>
12056  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
12057
12058 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
12059
12060 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
12061 ===============================================================================
12062
12063
12064 Installation changes
12065 --------------------
12066
12067  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
12068
12069 Software updates
12070 ----------------
12071
12072 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
12073
12074  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
12075  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
12076    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
12077    choose one of the others see manual.)
12078  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
12079  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
12080  * GOsa 2.7.4
12081  * LTSP 5.5.4
12082  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
12083  * new boot framework: systemd
12084  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
12085  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
12086  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
12087  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
12088  * golearn 0.9
12089  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
12090  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
12091  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
12092    installation.
12093  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
12094    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
12095
12096  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
12097  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
12098
12099 Fixed bugs
12100 ----------
12101
12102  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
12103    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
12104    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
12105  * and many others.
12106
12107 Documentation and translation updates
12108 -------------------------------------
12109
12110  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
12111    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
12112    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
12113
12114 Other changes
12115 -------------
12116
12117  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
12118    server takes more time.
12119  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
12120    doesn't work.
12121
12122 Regressions / known problems
12123 ----------------------------
12124
12125  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
12126    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
12127    and Debian bug #762103).
12128  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
12129    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
12130  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
12131    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
12132    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
12133
12134 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
12135
12136  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
12137
12138 How to report bugs
12139 ------------------
12140
12141 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
12142
12143 About Debian
12144 ============
12145
12146 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
12147 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
12148 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
12149 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
12150 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
12151 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
12152 operating system.
12153
12154 Contact Information
12155 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
12156 mail to press@debian.org.
12157
12158  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
12159 </pre>
12160
12161       </div>
12162       <div class="tags">
12163
12164
12165         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12166
12167
12168       </div>
12169     </div>
12170     <div class="padding"></div>
12171
12172     <div class="entry">
12173       <div class="title">
12174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
12175       </div>
12176       <div class="date">
12177         23rd October 2014
12178       </div>
12179       <div class="body">
12180         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
12181 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
12182 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
12183 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
12184 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
12185 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
12186 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
12187 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
12188 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
12189 live.</p>
12190
12191 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
12192 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
12193 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
12194 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
12195 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
12196 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
12197 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
12198 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
12199
12200       </div>
12201       <div class="tags">
12202
12203
12204         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>.
12205
12206
12207       </div>
12208     </div>
12209     <div class="padding"></div>
12210
12211     <div class="entry">
12212       <div class="title">
12213         <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>
12214       </div>
12215       <div class="date">
12216         22nd October 2014
12217       </div>
12218       <div class="body">
12219         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
12220 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
12221 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
12222 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
12223 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
12224 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
12225 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
12226 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
12227 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
12228 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
12229 lists I recently took over:</p>
12230
12231 <p><blockquote><pre>
12232 % time listadmin xiph
12233 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
12234 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
12235
12236 real    0m1.709s
12237 user    0m0.232s
12238 sys     0m0.012s
12239 %
12240 </pre></blockquote></p>
12241
12242 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
12243 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
12244 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
12245 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
12246 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
12247 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
12248 program.</p>
12249
12250 <p>If you install
12251 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
12252 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
12253 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
12254
12255 <p><blockquote><pre>
12256 username username@example.org
12257 spamlevel 23
12258 default discard
12259 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
12260
12261 password secret
12262 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
12263 mailman-list@lists.example.com
12264
12265 password hidden
12266 other-list@otherserver.example.org
12267 </pre></blockquote></p>
12268
12269 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
12270 learn the details.</p>
12271
12272 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
12273 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
12274 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
12275 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
12276
12277 <p><blockquote><pre>
12278 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
12279 </pre></blockquote></p>
12280
12281 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
12282 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
12283 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
12284 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
12285 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
12286 email.</p>
12287
12288 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
12289 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
12290 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
12291 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
12292 software.</p>
12293
12294 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12295 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12296 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12297
12298 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
12299 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
12300 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
12301 sure why.</p>
12302
12303       </div>
12304       <div class="tags">
12305
12306
12307         Tags: <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>.
12308
12309
12310       </div>
12311     </div>
12312     <div class="padding"></div>
12313
12314     <div class="entry">
12315       <div class="title">
12316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
12317       </div>
12318       <div class="date">
12319         17th October 2014
12320       </div>
12321       <div class="body">
12322         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
12323 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
12324 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
12325 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
12326 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
12327 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
12328 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
12329
12330 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
12331 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
12332 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
12333 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
12334 of this story.)</p>
12335
12336 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
12337 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
12338 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
12339 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
12340 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
12341 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
12342 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
12343 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
12344 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
12345 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
12346
12347 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
12348 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
12349 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
12350 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
12351
12352 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
12353 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
12354
12355 <p><blockquote><pre>
12356 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
12357 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
12358 </pre></blockquote></p>
12359
12360 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
12361 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
12362 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
12363 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
12364 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
12365 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
12366 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
12367 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
12368
12369 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
12370 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
12371
12372 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
12373 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
12374 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
12375 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
12376 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
12377
12378 <p><blockquote><pre>
12379 Task: isenkram-packages
12380 Section: hardware
12381 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
12382  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
12383  proposed.
12384 Test-new-install: show show
12385 Relevance: 8
12386 Packages: for-current-hardware
12387
12388 Task: isenkram-firmware
12389 Section: hardware
12390 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
12391  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
12392  packages are proposed.
12393 Test-new-install: mark show
12394 Relevance: 8
12395 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
12396 </pre></blockquote></p>
12397
12398 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
12399 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
12400 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
12401 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
12402 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
12403
12404 <p><blockquote><pre>
12405 #!/bin/sh
12406 #
12407 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
12408 export PATH
12409 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
12410 </pre></blockquote></p>
12411
12412 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
12413 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
12414
12415 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
12416 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
12417 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
12418 install.</p>
12419
12420 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
12421 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
12422 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
12423
12424       </div>
12425       <div class="tags">
12426
12427
12428         Tags: <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>.
12429
12430
12431       </div>
12432     </div>
12433     <div class="padding"></div>
12434
12435     <div class="entry">
12436       <div class="title">
12437         <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>
12438       </div>
12439       <div class="date">
12440          4th October 2014
12441       </div>
12442       <div class="body">
12443         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
12444 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
12445 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
12446 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
12447
12448 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
12449
12450 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
12451 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
12452 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
12453
12454       </div>
12455       <div class="tags">
12456
12457
12458         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12459
12460
12461       </div>
12462     </div>
12463     <div class="padding"></div>
12464
12465     <div class="entry">
12466       <div class="title">
12467         <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>
12468       </div>
12469       <div class="date">
12470          4th October 2014
12471       </div>
12472       <div class="body">
12473         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
12474 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
12475 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
12476 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
12477 Dibb.</p>
12478
12479 <p>I just wrapped up
12480 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
12481 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
12482 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
12483 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
12484 0.17.</p>
12485
12486 <ul>
12487
12488  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
12489  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
12490    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
12491  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
12492  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
12493  <li>Fix include orders</li>
12494  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
12495  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
12496  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
12497    the palette size is the same.</li>
12498  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
12499  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
12500  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
12501  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
12502    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
12503
12504 </ul>
12505
12506 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
12507 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
12508 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
12509
12510       </div>
12511       <div class="tags">
12512
12513
12514         Tags: <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>.
12515
12516
12517       </div>
12518     </div>
12519     <div class="padding"></div>
12520
12521     <div class="entry">
12522       <div class="title">
12523         <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>
12524       </div>
12525       <div class="date">
12526         26th September 2014
12527       </div>
12528       <div class="body">
12529         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12530 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
12531 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
12532 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
12533 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
12534 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
12535 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
12536 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
12537 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
12538 future.  The
12539 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
12540 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
12541 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
12542 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
12543 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
12544
12545 <p>First, download the test ISO via
12546 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
12547 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
12548 or rsync (use
12549 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
12550 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
12551 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
12552 install with some tweaking.</p>
12553
12554 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
12555 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
12556
12557 <p><blockquote><pre>
12558 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
12559 </pre></blockquote></p>
12560
12561 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
12562 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
12563 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
12564 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
12565
12566 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
12567 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
12568 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
12569 your need.</p>
12570
12571 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
12572 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
12573 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
12574 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
12575 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
12576 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
12577 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
12578 days.</p>
12579
12580 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
12581 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
12582 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
12583 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
12584 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
12585 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
12586 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
12587 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
12588 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
12589
12590 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
12591 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
12592 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
12593
12594       </div>
12595       <div class="tags">
12596
12597
12598         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>.
12599
12600
12601       </div>
12602     </div>
12603     <div class="padding"></div>
12604
12605     <div class="entry">
12606       <div class="title">
12607         <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>
12608       </div>
12609       <div class="date">
12610         25th September 2014
12611       </div>
12612       <div class="body">
12613         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
12614 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
12615 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
12616 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
12617 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
12618 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
12619 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
12620 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
12621 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
12622 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
12623 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
12624 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
12625 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
12626
12627 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
12628 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
12629 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
12630 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
12631 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
12632 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
12633 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
12634 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
12635 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
12636 list</a>. :)</p>
12637
12638       </div>
12639       <div class="tags">
12640
12641
12642         Tags: <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>.
12643
12644
12645       </div>
12646     </div>
12647     <div class="padding"></div>
12648
12649     <div class="entry">
12650       <div class="title">
12651         <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>
12652       </div>
12653       <div class="date">
12654         16th September 2014
12655       </div>
12656       <div class="body">
12657         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
12658 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
12659 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
12660 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
12661 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
12662 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
12663 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
12664 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
12665 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
12666 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
12667 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
12668 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
12669 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
12670 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
12671
12672 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
12673 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
12674 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
12675 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
12676 depend on the small and clever package
12677 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
12678 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
12679 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
12680 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
12681 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
12682 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
12683 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
12684 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
12685 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
12686 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
12687 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
12688
12689 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
12690 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
12691 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
12692 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
12693 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
12694 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
12695 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
12696 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
12697 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
12698 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
12699 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
12700 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
12701 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
12702 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
12703 dialog.</p>
12704
12705 <p><table>
12706
12707 <tr>
12708 <th>Machine/setup</th>
12709 <th>Original tasksel</th>
12710 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
12711 <th>Reduction</th>
12712 </tr>
12713
12714 <tr>
12715 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
12716 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
12717 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
12718 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
12719 </tr>
12720
12721 <tr>
12722 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
12723 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
12724 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
12725 <td>23 min 40%</td>
12726 </tr>
12727
12728 <tr>
12729 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
12730 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
12731 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
12732 <td>11 min 50%</td>
12733 </tr>
12734
12735 <tr>
12736 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
12737 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
12738 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
12739 <td>2 min 33%</td>
12740 </tr>
12741
12742 <tr>
12743 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
12744 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
12745 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
12746 <td>4 min 21%</td>
12747 </tr>
12748
12749 </table></p>
12750
12751 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
12752 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
12753 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
12754 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
12755 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
12756 installed.</p>
12757
12758 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
12759 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
12760 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
12761 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
12762 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
12763 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
12764 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
12765 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
12766 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
12767 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
12768 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
12769 for the entire installation.</p>
12770
12771 <p>I've implemented this in the
12772 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
12773 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
12774 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
12775 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
12776 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
12777
12778 <p><blockquote><pre>
12779 #!/bin/sh
12780 set -e
12781 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
12782 info() {
12783     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
12784 }
12785 error() {
12786     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
12787 }
12788 override_install() {
12789     apt-install eatmydata || true
12790     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
12791         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
12792             file=/usr/bin/$bin
12793             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
12794             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
12795                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
12796                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
12797                     > /target$file.edu
12798                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
12799                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
12800                     --rename --quiet --add $file
12801                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
12802             else
12803                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
12804             fi
12805         done
12806     else
12807         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
12808     fi
12809 }
12810
12811 override_install
12812 </pre></blockquote></p>
12813
12814 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
12815 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
12816
12817 <p><blockquote><pre>
12818 #! /bin/sh -e
12819 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
12820 error() {
12821     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
12822 }
12823 remove_install_override() {
12824     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
12825         file=/usr/bin/$bin
12826         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
12827             rm /target$file
12828             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
12829                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
12830             rm /target$file.edu
12831         else
12832             error "Missing divert for $file."
12833         fi
12834     done
12835     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
12836 }
12837
12838 remove_install_override
12839 </pre></blockquote></p>
12840
12841 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
12842 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
12843 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
12844
12845 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
12846 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
12847 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
12848 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
12849 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
12850 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
12851 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
12852 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
12853 everyone.</p>
12854
12855 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
12856 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
12857 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
12858 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
12859
12860 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
12861 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
12862 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
12863 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
12864 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
12865
12866 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
12867 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
12868 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
12869 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
12870 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
12871
12872       </div>
12873       <div class="tags">
12874
12875
12876         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>.
12877
12878
12879       </div>
12880     </div>
12881     <div class="padding"></div>
12882
12883     <div class="entry">
12884       <div class="title">
12885         <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>
12886       </div>
12887       <div class="date">
12888         10th September 2014
12889       </div>
12890       <div class="body">
12891         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
12892 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
12893 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
12894 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
12895 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
12896 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
12897 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
12898 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
12899 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
12900 those problems are gone now.</p>
12901
12902 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
12903 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
12904 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
12905 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
12906 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
12907
12908 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
12909 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
12910 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
12911
12912 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
12913 line:</p>
12914
12915 <p><blockquote><pre>
12916 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
12917 </pre></blockquote></p>
12918
12919 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
12920 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
12921 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
12922 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
12923
12924 <p><blockquote><pre>
12925 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
12926 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
12927 %
12928 </pre></blockquote></p>
12929
12930 <p>Now if only
12931 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
12932 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
12933 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
12934 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
12935 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
12936 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
12937 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
12938 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
12939 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
12940
12941       </div>
12942       <div class="tags">
12943
12944
12945         Tags: <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>.
12946
12947
12948       </div>
12949     </div>
12950     <div class="padding"></div>
12951
12952     <div class="entry">
12953       <div class="title">
12954         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
12955       </div>
12956       <div class="date">
12957         25th August 2014
12958       </div>
12959       <div class="body">
12960         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
12961 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
12962 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
12963 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
12964 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
12965 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
12966 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
12967 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
12968 am not sure.
12969 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
12970 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
12971 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
12972 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
12973 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
12974 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
12975 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
12976 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
12977 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
12978 licenses are.</p>
12979
12980 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
12981 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
12982 end user</a>
12983 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
12984 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
12985
12986 <p><blockquote>
12987 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
12988 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
12989
12990 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
12991 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
12992 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
12993 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
12994 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
12995 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
12996 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
12997 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
12998 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
12999 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
13000 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
13001 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
13002 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
13003 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
13004 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
13005 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
13006 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
13007 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
13008
13009 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
13010 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
13011
13012 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
13013 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
13014 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
13015 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
13016 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
13017 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
13018 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
13019 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
13020 </blockquote></p>
13021
13022 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
13023 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
13024
13025 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
13026 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
13027
13028 <p><blockquote>
13029
13030 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
13031 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
13032 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
13033 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
13034 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
13035 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
13036 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
13037 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
13038 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
13039 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
13040 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
13041 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
13042
13043 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
13044 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
13045 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
13046 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
13047 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
13048 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
13049 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
13050 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
13051 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
13052 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
13053 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
13054 additional details.</p>
13055
13056 </blockquote></p>
13057
13058 <p>Some free software like
13059 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
13060 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
13061 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
13062 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
13063
13064       </div>
13065       <div class="tags">
13066
13067
13068         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>.
13069
13070
13071       </div>
13072     </div>
13073     <div class="padding"></div>
13074
13075     <div class="entry">
13076       <div class="title">
13077         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
13078       </div>
13079       <div class="date">
13080         31st July 2014
13081       </div>
13082       <div class="body">
13083         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
13084 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13085 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
13086 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
13087 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
13088 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
13089
13090 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13091
13092 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
13093 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
13094 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
13095 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
13096 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
13097 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
13098 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
13099 works with Windows . :-(</p>
13100
13101 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
13102 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
13103 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
13104 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
13105 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
13106 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
13107
13108 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13109 project?</strong></p>
13110
13111 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
13112 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
13113 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
13114 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
13115 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
13116 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
13117 with this job.</p>
13118
13119 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13120 Edu?</strong></p>
13121
13122 <p>The independence.</p>
13123
13124 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
13125 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
13126 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
13127
13128 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
13129 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
13130 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
13131 working reliable. </p>
13132
13133 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
13134 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
13135 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
13136 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
13137 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
13138 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
13139 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
13140 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
13141
13142 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13143 Edu?</strong></p>
13144
13145 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
13146 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
13147 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
13148
13149 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13150
13151 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
13152 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
13153
13154 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13155 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13156
13157 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
13158 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
13159 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
13160 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
13161 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
13162 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
13163 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
13164
13165       </div>
13166       <div class="tags">
13167
13168
13169         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13170
13171
13172       </div>
13173     </div>
13174     <div class="padding"></div>
13175
13176     <div class="entry">
13177       <div class="title">
13178         <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>
13179       </div>
13180       <div class="date">
13181         23rd July 2014
13182       </div>
13183       <div class="body">
13184         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
13185 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
13186 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
13187 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
13188 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
13189 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
13190 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
13191 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
13192 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
13193 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
13194 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
13195 the translation show this very well:</p>
13196
13197 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
13198
13199 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
13200 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
13201 project pages and the
13202 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
13203 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
13204 and HTML version available in the
13205 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
13206 directory</a>.</p>
13207
13208 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
13209 you find any.</p>
13210
13211       </div>
13212       <div class="tags">
13213
13214
13215         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>.
13216
13217
13218       </div>
13219     </div>
13220     <div class="padding"></div>
13221
13222     <div class="entry">
13223       <div class="title">
13224         <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>
13225       </div>
13226       <div class="date">
13227         17th June 2014
13228       </div>
13229       <div class="body">
13230         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13231 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
13232 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
13233 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
13234 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
13235
13236 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
13237 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
13238 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
13239 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
13240 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
13241 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
13242 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
13243 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
13244 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
13245 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
13246 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
13247 goals.</p>
13248
13249 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
13250 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
13251 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
13252 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
13253 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
13254 chapters together into one large web page (aka
13255 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
13256 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
13257 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
13258 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
13259 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
13260 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
13261 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
13262 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
13263 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
13264 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
13265 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
13266 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
13267 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
13268 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
13269 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
13270 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
13271 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
13272 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
13273
13274 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
13275 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
13276 track the English original.  For this we use the
13277 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
13278 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
13279 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
13280 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
13281 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
13282 files), which the translations update with the native language
13283 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
13284 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
13285 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
13286 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
13287 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
13288 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
13289 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
13290 of the documentation.</p>
13291
13292 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
13293 recommend using
13294 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
13295 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
13296 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
13297 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
13298 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
13299 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
13300 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
13301 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
13302
13303 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
13304 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
13305 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
13306 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
13307 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
13308 translated images by storing translated versions in
13309 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
13310 package maintainers know more.</p>
13311
13312 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
13313 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
13314 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
13315 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
13316 PDF version</a> or the
13317 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
13318 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
13319 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
13320
13321 <p>To learn more, check out
13322 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
13323 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
13324 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
13325 manual on the wiki</a> and
13326 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
13327 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
13328
13329       </div>
13330       <div class="tags">
13331
13332
13333         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>.
13334
13335
13336       </div>
13337     </div>
13338     <div class="padding"></div>
13339
13340     <div class="entry">
13341       <div class="title">
13342         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
13343       </div>
13344       <div class="date">
13345         29th May 2014
13346       </div>
13347       <div class="body">
13348         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
13349 in my car, connected to
13350 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
13351 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
13352 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
13353 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
13354 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
13355 such car computer.</p>
13356
13357 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
13358
13359 <ul>
13360
13361  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
13362
13363  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
13364    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
13365    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
13366    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
13367    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
13368
13369  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
13370    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
13371    route.</li>
13372
13373  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
13374
13375  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
13376    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
13377    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
13378    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
13379    connection do not work.</li>
13380
13381  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
13382    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
13383
13384  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
13385    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
13386
13387  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
13388    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
13389
13390 </ul>
13391
13392 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
13393 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
13394
13395       </div>
13396       <div class="tags">
13397
13398
13399         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13400
13401
13402       </div>
13403     </div>
13404     <div class="padding"></div>
13405
13406     <div class="entry">
13407       <div class="title">
13408         <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>
13409       </div>
13410       <div class="date">
13411         29th April 2014
13412       </div>
13413       <div class="body">
13414         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
13415 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
13416 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
13417 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
13418 newer AVM2 format - see
13419 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
13420 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
13421 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
13422 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
13423 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
13424 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
13425 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
13426 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
13427 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
13428 sites do not work yet.</p>
13429
13430 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
13431 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
13432 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
13433 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
13434 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
13435 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
13436 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
13437 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
13438 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
13439 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
13440 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
13441
13442 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
13443 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
13444 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
13445 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
13446 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
13447 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
13448 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
13449
13450 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
13451 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
13452 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
13453 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
13454 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
13455
13456       </div>
13457       <div class="tags">
13458
13459
13460         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>.
13461
13462
13463       </div>
13464     </div>
13465     <div class="padding"></div>
13466
13467     <div class="entry">
13468       <div class="title">
13469         <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>
13470       </div>
13471       <div class="date">
13472         23rd April 2014
13473       </div>
13474       <div class="body">
13475         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
13476 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
13477 So I implemented one, using
13478 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
13479 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
13480 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
13481 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
13482 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
13483 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
13484
13485 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
13486 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
13487 packages to install.  The first part is in
13488 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
13489 this:</p>
13490
13491 <p><blockquote><pre>
13492 Task: isenkram
13493 Section: hardware
13494 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
13495  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
13496  proposed.
13497 Test-new-install: mark show
13498 Relevance: 8
13499 Packages: for-current-hardware
13500 </pre></blockquote></p>
13501
13502 <p>The second part is in
13503 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
13504 this:</p>
13505
13506 <p><blockquote><pre>
13507 #!/bin/sh
13508 #
13509 (
13510     isenkram-lookup
13511     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
13512 ) | sort -u
13513 </pre></blockquote></p>
13514
13515 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
13516 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
13517 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
13518 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
13519 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
13520 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
13521
13522 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
13523 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
13524 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
13525 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
13526 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
13527 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
13528 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
13529 the python-apt code (bug
13530 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
13531 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
13532 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
13533 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
13534 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
13535 unstable today.</p>
13536
13537 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
13538 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
13539 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
13540 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
13541 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
13542 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
13543 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
13544 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
13545 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
13546
13547 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
13548 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
13549 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
13550 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
13551 package.  See also
13552 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
13553 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
13554 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
13555 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
13556
13557       </div>
13558       <div class="tags">
13559
13560
13561         Tags: <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>.
13562
13563
13564       </div>
13565     </div>
13566     <div class="padding"></div>
13567
13568     <div class="entry">
13569       <div class="title">
13570         <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>
13571       </div>
13572       <div class="date">
13573         15th April 2014
13574       </div>
13575       <div class="body">
13576         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
13577 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
13578 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
13579 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
13580 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
13581 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
13582
13583 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
13584 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
13585 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
13586 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
13587 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
13588 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
13589 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
13590
13591 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
13592 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
13593 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
13594 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
13595 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
13596 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
13597 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
13598 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
13599 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
13600 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
13601 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
13602 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
13603
13604 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
13605 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
13606 become root:</p>
13607
13608 <p><pre>
13609 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
13610   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
13611   u-boot-tools
13612 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
13613   freedom-maker
13614 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
13615 </pre></p>
13616
13617 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
13618 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
13619 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
13620 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
13621 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
13622 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
13623 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
13624 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
13625
13626 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
13627 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
13628 the preseed values:</p>
13629
13630 <p><pre>
13631 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
13632 </pre></p>
13633
13634 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
13635 it still work.</p>
13636
13637 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
13638 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
13639 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
13640 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
13641 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
13642 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
13643 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
13644
13645 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
13646 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
13647 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
13648 irc.debian.org)</a> and
13649 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
13650 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
13651
13652       </div>
13653       <div class="tags">
13654
13655
13656         Tags: <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>.
13657
13658
13659       </div>
13660     </div>
13661     <div class="padding"></div>
13662
13663     <div class="entry">
13664       <div class="title">
13665         <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>
13666       </div>
13667       <div class="date">
13668          9th April 2014
13669       </div>
13670       <div class="body">
13671         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
13672 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
13673 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
13674 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
13675 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
13676 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
13677 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
13678 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
13679 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
13680 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
13681 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
13682 have looked at a system called
13683 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
13684 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
13685
13686 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
13687 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
13688 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
13689 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
13690 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
13691 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
13692 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
13693 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
13694 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
13695 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
13696 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
13697 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
13698 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
13699
13700 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
13701 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
13702 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
13703 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
13704 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
13705 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
13706 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
13707 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
13708 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
13709 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
13710 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
13711 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
13712 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
13713 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
13714 account.</p>
13715
13716 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
13717 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
13718 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
13719 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
13720 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
13721 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
13722 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
13723
13724 <p><blockquote><pre>
13725 [s3c]
13726 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
13727 backend-login: API-login
13728 backend-password: API-password
13729 fs-passphrase: local-password
13730 </pre></blockquote></p>
13731
13732 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
13733 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
13734 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
13735 details and password to create it:</p>
13736
13737 <p><blockquote><pre>
13738 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
13739 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
13740   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
13741 Enter backend login:
13742 Enter backend password:
13743 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
13744 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
13745 Enter encryption password:
13746 Confirm encryption password:
13747 Generating random encryption key...
13748 Creating metadata tables...
13749 Dumping metadata...
13750 ..objects..
13751 ..blocks..
13752 ..inodes..
13753 ..inode_blocks..
13754 ..symlink_targets..
13755 ..names..
13756 ..contents..
13757 ..ext_attributes..
13758 Compressing and uploading metadata...
13759 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
13760 # </pre></blockquote></p>
13761
13762 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
13763
13764 <p><blockquote><pre>
13765 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
13766   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
13767 Using 4 upload threads.
13768 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
13769 Reading metadata...
13770 ..objects..
13771 ..blocks..
13772 ..inodes..
13773 ..inode_blocks..
13774 ..symlink_targets..
13775 ..names..
13776 ..contents..
13777 ..ext_attributes..
13778 Mounting filesystem...
13779 # df -h /s3ql
13780 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
13781 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
13782 #
13783 </pre></blockquote></p>
13784
13785 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
13786 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
13787 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
13788 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
13789 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
13790 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
13791
13792 <p><blockquote><pre>
13793 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
13794 #
13795 </pre></blockquote></p>
13796
13797 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
13798 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
13799 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
13800 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
13801 file system:</p>
13802
13803 <p><blockquote><pre>
13804 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
13805 Using cached metadata.
13806 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
13807 Checking DB integrity...
13808 Creating temporary extra indices...
13809 Checking lost+found...
13810 Checking cached objects...
13811 Checking names (refcounts)...
13812 Checking contents (names)...
13813 Checking contents (inodes)...
13814 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
13815 Checking objects (reference counts)...
13816 Checking objects (backend)...
13817 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
13818 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
13819 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
13820 Checking objects (sizes)...
13821 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
13822 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
13823 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
13824 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
13825 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
13826 Checking inodes (sizes)...
13827 Checking extended attributes (names)...
13828 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
13829 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
13830 Checking directory reachability...
13831 Checking unix conventions...
13832 Checking referential integrity...
13833 Dropping temporary indices...
13834 Backing up old metadata...
13835 Dumping metadata...
13836 ..objects..
13837 ..blocks..
13838 ..inodes..
13839 ..inode_blocks..
13840 ..symlink_targets..
13841 ..names..
13842 ..contents..
13843 ..ext_attributes..
13844 Compressing and uploading metadata...
13845 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
13846 #
13847 </pre></blockquote></p>
13848
13849 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
13850 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
13851 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
13852 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
13853 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
13854 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
13855 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
13856 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
13857 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
13858 working set.</p>
13859
13860 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
13861 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
13862 busy:</p>
13863
13864 <p><blockquote><pre>
13865 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
13866   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
13867 Using 8 upload threads.
13868 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
13869 #
13870 </pre></blockquote></p>
13871
13872 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
13873 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
13874 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
13875 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
13876 s3qlctrl:
13877
13878 <p><blockquote><pre>
13879 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
13880 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
13881 #
13882 </pre></blockquote></p>
13883
13884 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
13885 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
13886 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
13887 a report:</p>
13888
13889 <p><blockquote><pre>
13890 # s3qlstat /s3ql
13891 Directory entries:    9141
13892 Inodes:               9143
13893 Data blocks:          8851
13894 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
13895 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
13896 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
13897 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
13898 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
13899 #
13900 </pre></blockquote></p>
13901
13902 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
13903 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
13904 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
13905 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
13906 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
13907 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
13908 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
13909 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
13910 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
13911 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
13912 best.</p>
13913
13914 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
13915 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
13916 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
13917 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
13918 poster is titled
13919 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
13920 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
13921 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
13922 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
13923 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
13924
13925 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
13926 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
13927 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
13928 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
13929 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
13930 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
13931 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
13932 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
13933
13934 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
13935 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
13936 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
13937 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
13938 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
13939 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
13940 only read from it.</p>
13941
13942 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
13943 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
13944 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13945
13946       </div>
13947       <div class="tags">
13948
13949
13950         Tags: <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>.
13951
13952
13953       </div>
13954     </div>
13955     <div class="padding"></div>
13956
13957     <div class="entry">
13958       <div class="title">
13959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
13960       </div>
13961       <div class="date">
13962          1st April 2014
13963       </div>
13964       <div class="body">
13965         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
13966 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
13967 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
13968 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
13969 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
13970 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
13971 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
13972 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
13973 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
13974 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
13975 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
13976 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
13977 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
13978
13979 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
13980 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
13981 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
13982 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
13983 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
13984 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
13985 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
13986 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
13987 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
13988 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
13989 Linux.</p>
13990
13991 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
13992 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
13993 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
13994 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
13995 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
13996 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
13997 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
13998 Windows before metro).</p>
13999
14000 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
14001 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
14002 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
14003 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
14004 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
14005 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
14006 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
14007 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
14008 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
14009 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
14010 old Windows binaries, check it out by
14011 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
14012 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
14013 image.</p>
14014
14015       </div>
14016       <div class="tags">
14017
14018
14019         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>.
14020
14021
14022       </div>
14023     </div>
14024     <div class="padding"></div>
14025
14026     <div class="entry">
14027       <div class="title">
14028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
14029       </div>
14030       <div class="date">
14031         30th March 2014
14032       </div>
14033       <div class="body">
14034         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
14035 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
14036 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
14037 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
14038 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
14039
14040 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14041
14042 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
14043 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
14044 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
14045 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
14046 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
14047
14048 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
14049 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
14050 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
14051
14052 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
14053 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
14054 hunger.</p>
14055
14056 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14057 project?</strong></p>
14058
14059 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
14060 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
14061 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
14062 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
14063 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
14064 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
14065 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
14066 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
14067 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
14068 running.  I just loved it.</p>
14069
14070 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14071 Edu?</strong></p>
14072
14073 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
14074 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
14075 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
14076 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
14077 be made of steel.</p>
14078
14079 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14080 Edu?</strong></p>
14081
14082 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
14083
14084 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
14085 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
14086 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
14087 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
14088 or dropped.</p>
14089
14090 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
14091 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
14092 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
14093 discourage many people too.</p>
14094
14095 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14096
14097 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
14098 Virtualbox.</p>
14099
14100
14101 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14102 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14103
14104 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
14105 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
14106 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
14107 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
14108 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
14109 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
14110 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
14111 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
14112 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
14113
14114       </div>
14115       <div class="tags">
14116
14117
14118         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14119
14120
14121       </div>
14122     </div>
14123     <div class="padding"></div>
14124
14125     <div class="entry">
14126       <div class="title">
14127         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
14128       </div>
14129       <div class="date">
14130         25th March 2014
14131       </div>
14132       <div class="body">
14133         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
14134 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
14135 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
14136 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
14137 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
14138 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
14139 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
14140 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
14141 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
14142
14143 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
14144 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
14145 looked a given way.  Such
14146 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
14147 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
14148 called a
14149 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
14150 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
14151 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
14152 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
14153 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
14154 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
14155 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
14156 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
14157 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
14158 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
14159 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
14160 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
14161 There are several commercial services around providing such
14162 timestamping.  A quick search for
14163 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
14164 service</a>" pointed me to at least
14165 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
14166 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
14167 Vadis</a>,
14168 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
14169 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
14170 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
14171 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
14172
14173 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
14174 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
14175 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
14176 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
14177 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
14178 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
14179 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
14180 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
14181 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
14182 Greifswald.</p>
14183
14184 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
14185 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
14186 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
14187 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
14188 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
14189
14190 <p><blockquote><pre>
14191 #!/bin/sh
14192 set -e
14193 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
14194 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
14195 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
14196 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
14197 cafile=chain.txt
14198 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
14199     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
14200 fi
14201 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
14202     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
14203 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
14204 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
14205 base64 < "$resfile"
14206 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
14207 </pre></blockquote></p>
14208
14209 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
14210 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
14211 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
14212 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
14213 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
14214 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
14215 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
14216 changed.</p>
14217
14218 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
14219 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
14220 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
14221 to set up?</p>
14222
14223       </div>
14224       <div class="tags">
14225
14226
14227         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>.
14228
14229
14230       </div>
14231     </div>
14232     <div class="padding"></div>
14233
14234     <div class="entry">
14235       <div class="title">
14236         <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>
14237       </div>
14238       <div class="date">
14239         21st March 2014
14240       </div>
14241       <div class="body">
14242         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
14243 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
14244 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
14245 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
14246 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
14247 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
14248 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
14249
14250 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
14251 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
14252 tried using
14253 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
14254 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
14255 and program
14256 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
14257 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
14258 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
14259 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
14260 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
14261 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
14262 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
14263 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
14264 this method.</p>
14265
14266 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
14267 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
14268 problem is
14269 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
14270 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
14271 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
14272 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
14273 DVD structures, as the python library
14274 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
14275 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
14276 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
14277 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
14278 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
14279 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
14280
14281 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
14282 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
14283
14284       </div>
14285       <div class="tags">
14286
14287
14288         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>.
14289
14290
14291       </div>
14292     </div>
14293     <div class="padding"></div>
14294
14295     <div class="entry">
14296       <div class="title">
14297         <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>
14298       </div>
14299       <div class="date">
14300         14th March 2014
14301       </div>
14302       <div class="body">
14303         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
14304 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
14305 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
14306 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
14307 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
14308 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
14309 release (0.2).</p>
14310
14311 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
14312 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
14313 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
14314 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
14315 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
14316 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
14317 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
14318 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
14319 and build using
14320 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
14321 with a user with sudo access to become root:
14322
14323 <pre>
14324 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
14325   freedom-maker
14326 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
14327   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
14328   u-boot-tools
14329 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
14330 </pre>
14331
14332 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
14333 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
14334 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
14335 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
14336 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
14337 kpartx call.</p>
14338
14339 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
14340 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
14341 the preseed values:</p>
14342
14343 <pre>
14344 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
14345 </pre>
14346
14347 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
14348 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
14349 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
14350 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
14351 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
14352 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
14353
14354 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
14355 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
14356 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
14357 irc.debian.org)</a> and
14358 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
14359 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
14360
14361       </div>
14362       <div class="tags">
14363
14364
14365         Tags: <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>.
14366
14367
14368       </div>
14369     </div>
14370     <div class="padding"></div>
14371
14372     <div class="entry">
14373       <div class="title">
14374         <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>
14375       </div>
14376       <div class="date">
14377         12th March 2014
14378       </div>
14379       <div class="body">
14380         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
14381 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
14382 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
14383 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
14384 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
14385 document this better when one of the customers of
14386 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
14387 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
14388 get this working are the following:</p>
14389
14390 <p><ol>
14391
14392 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
14393 example host here.</li>
14394
14395 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
14396 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
14397
14398 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
14399 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
14400
14401 </ol></p>
14402
14403 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
14404 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
14405 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
14406 started).</p>
14407
14408 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
14409 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
14410
14411 <p><blockquote><pre>
14412 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
14413 Export list for nas-server:
14414 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
14415 root@tjener:~#
14416 </pre></blockquote></p>
14417
14418 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
14419 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
14420 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
14421 NFS access.</p>
14422
14423 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
14424 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
14425 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
14426
14427 <p><blockquote><pre>
14428 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14429 </pre></blockquote></p>
14430
14431 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
14432 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
14433 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
14434 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
14435
14436 <p><blockquote><pre>
14437 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14438 objectClass: automount
14439 cn: nas-server
14440 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14441
14442 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14443 objectClass: top
14444 objectClass: automountMap
14445 ou: auto.nas-server
14446
14447 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14448 objectClass: automount
14449 cn: /
14450 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
14451 </pre></blockquote></p>
14452
14453 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
14454 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
14455 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
14456
14457 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
14458 the storage server directly by just visiting the
14459 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
14460 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
14461
14462       </div>
14463       <div class="tags">
14464
14465
14466         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
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/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>
14476       </div>
14477       <div class="date">
14478         22nd February 2014
14479       </div>
14480       <div class="body">
14481         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
14482 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
14483 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
14484 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
14485 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
14486 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
14487 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
14488 proper home since then.</p>
14489
14490 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
14491 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
14492 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
14493 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
14494 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
14495
14496 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
14497 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
14498 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
14499 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
14500 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
14501 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
14502 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
14503 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
14504 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
14505
14506       </div>
14507       <div class="tags">
14508
14509
14510         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14511
14512
14513       </div>
14514     </div>
14515     <div class="padding"></div>
14516
14517     <div class="entry">
14518       <div class="title">
14519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
14520       </div>
14521       <div class="date">
14522          3rd February 2014
14523       </div>
14524       <div class="body">
14525         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
14526 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
14527 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
14528 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
14529 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
14530 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
14531 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
14532 <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>,
14533 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
14534
14535 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
14536 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
14537 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
14538 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
14539 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
14540 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
14541
14542 <p><blockquote><pre>
14543 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
14544 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
14545 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
14546 dhclient /dev/eth0
14547 </pre></blockquote></p>
14548
14549 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
14550 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
14551 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
14552
14553 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
14554 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
14555 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
14556 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
14557 side.</p>
14558
14559 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
14560 stuff:</p>
14561
14562 <p><blockquote><pre>
14563 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
14564 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
14565 EOF
14566 apt-get update
14567 apt-get dist-upgrade
14568 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
14569     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
14570 update-alternatives --config runsystem
14571 </pre></blockquote></p>
14572
14573 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
14574 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
14575 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
14576 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
14577 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
14578 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
14579 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
14580 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
14581 ssh instead.
14582
14583 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
14584 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
14585 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
14586 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
14587 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
14588 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
14589
14590 <p><blockquote><pre>
14591 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
14592 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
14593 EOF
14594 </pre></blockquote></p>
14595
14596 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
14597 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
14598 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
14599 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
14600
14601 <p><blockquote><pre>
14602 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
14603 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
14604 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
14605 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
14606 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
14607 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
14608 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
14609 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
14610 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
14611 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
14612 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
14613 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
14614 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
14615 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
14616 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
14617 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
14618 #
14619 </pre></blockquote></p>
14620
14621 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
14622 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
14623 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
14624 command line stuff.<p>
14625
14626       </div>
14627       <div class="tags">
14628
14629
14630         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>.
14631
14632
14633       </div>
14634     </div>
14635     <div class="padding"></div>
14636
14637     <div class="entry">
14638       <div class="title">
14639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
14640       </div>
14641       <div class="date">
14642         29th January 2014
14643       </div>
14644       <div class="body">
14645         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
14646 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
14647 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
14648 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
14649 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
14650 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
14651 investigated in
14652 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
14653 from December 2013, in the article
14654 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
14655 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
14656 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
14657 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
14658 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
14659 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
14660 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
14661 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
14662
14663 <p><blockquote>
14664 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
14665 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
14666 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
14667 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
14668 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
14669 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
14670 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
14671 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
14672 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
14673 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
14674 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
14675 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
14676
14677 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
14678 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
14679 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
14680 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
14681 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
14682 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
14683 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
14684 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
14685 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
14686 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
14687 </blockquote><p>
14688
14689 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
14690 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
14691 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
14692 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
14693 summarized like this:</p>
14694
14695 <p><blockquote>
14696 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
14697 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
14698 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
14699 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
14700 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
14701 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
14702 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
14703 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
14704 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
14705 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
14706 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
14707 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
14708 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
14709 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
14710 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
14711 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
14712 </blockquote></p>
14713
14714 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
14715 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
14716 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
14717 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
14718
14719 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
14720 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
14721 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
14722
14723       </div>
14724       <div class="tags">
14725
14726
14727         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>.
14728
14729
14730       </div>
14731     </div>
14732     <div class="padding"></div>
14733
14734     <div class="entry">
14735       <div class="title">
14736         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
14737       </div>
14738       <div class="date">
14739         14th January 2014
14740       </div>
14741       <div class="body">
14742         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
14743 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
14744 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
14745 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
14746 the source.  The company behind it provide
14747 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
14748 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
14749 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
14750 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
14751 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
14752 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
14753 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
14754 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
14755 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
14756 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
14757 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
14758 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
14759 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
14760 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
14761 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
14762 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
14763 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
14764 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
14765 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
14766
14767 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
14768
14769 <ul>
14770
14771   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
14772   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
14773   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
14774
14775 </ul>
14776
14777 <p>You can
14778 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
14779 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
14780 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
14781 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
14782 include a test suite check.</p>
14783
14784       </div>
14785       <div class="tags">
14786
14787
14788         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>.
14789
14790
14791       </div>
14792     </div>
14793     <div class="padding"></div>
14794
14795     <div class="entry">
14796       <div class="title">
14797         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
14798       </div>
14799       <div class="date">
14800         25th December 2013
14801       </div>
14802       <div class="body">
14803         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14804 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
14805 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
14806 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
14807 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
14808 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
14809 George</a>.</p>
14810
14811 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
14812
14813 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14814
14815 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
14816 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
14817 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
14818 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
14819 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
14820 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
14821
14822 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
14823 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
14824 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
14825 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
14826 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
14827 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
14828 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
14829 to help building another school's informational education concept from
14830 scratch.</p>
14831
14832 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
14833 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
14834 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
14835
14836 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
14837 and cycling.</p>
14838
14839 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14840 project?</strong></p>
14841
14842 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
14843 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
14844 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
14845 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
14846 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
14847 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
14848
14849 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
14850 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
14851 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
14852 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
14853 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
14854 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
14855 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
14856 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
14857 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
14858
14859 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
14860 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
14861 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
14862 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
14863
14864 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14865 Edu?</strong></p>
14866
14867 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
14868 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
14869 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
14870 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
14871 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
14872 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
14873 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
14874 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
14875 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
14876 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
14877 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
14878 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
14879 that it rocks!</p>
14880
14881 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
14882 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
14883 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
14884 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
14885 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
14886 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
14887 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
14888
14889 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14890 Edu?</strong></p>
14891
14892 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
14893 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
14894 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
14895 can list a few points about that:</p>
14896
14897 <ul>
14898
14899  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
14900  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
14901  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
14902
14903 </ul>
14904
14905 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
14906
14907 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14908
14909 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
14910 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
14911 year.</p>
14912
14913 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
14914 run text tools. I use
14915 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
14916 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
14917 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
14918 based full-featured student management software with the two),
14919 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
14920 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
14921 coloured world called the WWW, I use
14922 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
14923 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
14924 e-mail.</p>
14925
14926 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
14927 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
14928 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
14929 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
14930 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
14931 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
14932 Facebook now ;).</p>
14933
14934 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14935 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14936
14937 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
14938 side is what I have experienced.</p>
14939
14940 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
14941 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
14942 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
14943 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
14944 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
14945 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
14946 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
14947 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
14948 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
14949 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
14950 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
14951 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
14952 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
14953 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
14954 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
14955 plain criminal.</p>
14956
14957 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
14958 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
14959 founded an association named
14960 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
14961 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
14962 area of free and open source software, for example the
14963 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
14964 Teckids and are the youth programme of
14965 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
14966 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
14967 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
14968 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
14969 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
14970 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
14971
14972 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
14973 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
14974 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
14975 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
14976 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
14977 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
14978 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
14979 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
14980 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
14981 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
14982 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
14983 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
14984
14985 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
14986 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
14987 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
14988 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
14989
14990 <!--
14991
14992 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
14993
14994 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
14995 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
14996
14997  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
14998    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
14999    of the decision makers above;
15000  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
15001    knowledge about free software
15002
15003 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
15004
15005 -->
15006
15007       </div>
15008       <div class="tags">
15009
15010
15011         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15012
15013
15014       </div>
15015     </div>
15016     <div class="padding"></div>
15017
15018     <div class="entry">
15019       <div class="title">
15020         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
15021       </div>
15022       <div class="date">
15023          6th December 2013
15024       </div>
15025       <div class="body">
15026         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
15027 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15028 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
15029 had a new school administrator show up on
15030 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
15031 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
15032 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
15033 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
15034 Germany a few years ago.</p>
15035
15036 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15037
15038 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
15039 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
15040 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
15041 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
15042
15043 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
15044 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
15045 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
15046 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
15047 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
15048 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
15049 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
15050 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
15051 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
15052
15053 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15054 project?</strong></p>
15055
15056 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
15057 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
15058 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
15059 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
15060
15061 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15062 Edu?</strong></p>
15063
15064 <ul>
15065   <li>Quick installation,</li>
15066   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
15067   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
15068   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
15069     single company,</li>
15070   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
15071     experience and problem solutions.</li>
15072 </ul>
15073
15074 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15075 Edu?</strong></p>
15076
15077 <ul>
15078   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
15079   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
15080   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
15081   working again reliably.
15082
15083   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
15084   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
15085   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
15086   as their base.
15087
15088   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
15089   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
15090   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
15091   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
15092   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
15093   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
15094
15095   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
15096   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
15097   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
15098   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
15099   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
15100   schemes.</li>
15101
15102   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
15103   compared to Debian.</li>
15104
15105 </ul>
15106
15107 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
15108 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
15109 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
15110 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
15111
15112 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15113
15114 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
15115 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
15116 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
15117 programming languages for teaching.</p>
15118
15119 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15120 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15121
15122 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
15123
15124 <ul>
15125
15126   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
15127     teaching and learning.</li>
15128
15129   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
15130     home, and at their working place without running into license or
15131     conversion problems.</li>
15132
15133   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
15134     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
15135     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
15136     science, not products.</li>
15137
15138   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
15139     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
15140
15141 </ul>
15142
15143       </div>
15144       <div class="tags">
15145
15146
15147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15148
15149
15150       </div>
15151     </div>
15152     <div class="padding"></div>
15153
15154     <div class="entry">
15155       <div class="title">
15156         <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>
15157       </div>
15158       <div class="date">
15159         30th November 2013
15160       </div>
15161       <div class="body">
15162         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
15163 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
15164 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
15165 experiment with interesting network technology, the
15166 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
15167 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
15168 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
15169 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
15170 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
15171 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
15172 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
15173 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
15174 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
15175 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
15176 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
15177 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
15178 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
15179 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
15180 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
15181 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
15182
15183       </div>
15184       <div class="tags">
15185
15186
15187         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>.
15188
15189
15190       </div>
15191     </div>
15192     <div class="padding"></div>
15193
15194     <div class="entry">
15195       <div class="title">
15196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
15197       </div>
15198       <div class="date">
15199         24th November 2013
15200       </div>
15201       <div class="body">
15202         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
15203 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
15204 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
15205 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
15206 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
15207 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
15208 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
15209 is working on.  I checked the
15210 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
15211 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
15212 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
15213 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
15214 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
15215 These are the release notes:</p>
15216
15217 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
15218
15219 <ul>
15220
15221   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
15222    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
15223    up.</li>
15224
15225   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
15226
15227   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
15228    Matthias Klose.</li>
15229
15230   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
15231    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
15232
15233   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
15234    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
15235    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
15236
15237 </ul>
15238
15239 <p>You can
15240 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
15241 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
15242 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
15243 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
15244 include a testsuite check.</p>
15245
15246       </div>
15247       <div class="tags">
15248
15249
15250         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>.
15251
15252
15253       </div>
15254     </div>
15255     <div class="padding"></div>
15256
15257     <div class="entry">
15258       <div class="title">
15259         <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>
15260       </div>
15261       <div class="date">
15262         21st November 2013
15263       </div>
15264       <div class="body">
15265         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
15266 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
15267 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
15268 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
15269 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
15270 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
15271 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
15272 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
15273 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
15274 TED talk
15275 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
15276 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
15277 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
15278
15279 <blockquote>
15280
15281 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
15282 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
15283 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
15284 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
15285 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
15286 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
15287 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
15288 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
15289 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
15290 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
15291 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
15292
15293 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
15294 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
15295 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
15296
15297 </blockquote>
15298
15299 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
15300 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
15301 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
15302 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
15303 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
15304 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
15305 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
15306 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
15307 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
15308
15309       </div>
15310       <div class="tags">
15311
15312
15313         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>.
15314
15315
15316       </div>
15317     </div>
15318     <div class="padding"></div>
15319
15320     <div class="entry">
15321       <div class="title">
15322         <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>
15323       </div>
15324       <div class="date">
15325         13th November 2013
15326       </div>
15327       <div class="body">
15328         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
15329 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
15330 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
15331 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
15332 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
15333 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
15334 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
15335 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
15336 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
15337 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
15338 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
15339 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
15340 right away. :)</p>
15341
15342       </div>
15343       <div class="tags">
15344
15345
15346         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>.
15347
15348
15349       </div>
15350     </div>
15351     <div class="padding"></div>
15352
15353     <div class="entry">
15354       <div class="title">
15355         <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>
15356       </div>
15357       <div class="date">
15358         10th November 2013
15359       </div>
15360       <div class="body">
15361         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
15362 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
15363 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
15364 MR3040 as a mesh node using
15365 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
15366
15367 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
15368 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
15369 and downloaded
15370 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
15371 recommended firmware image</a>
15372 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
15373 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
15374 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
15375 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
15376 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
15377
15378 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
15379 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
15380 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
15381 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
15382 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
15383 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
15384 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
15385 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
15386 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
15387 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
15388 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
15389 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
15390 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
15391
15392 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
15393 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
15394 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
15395 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
15396 them:</p>
15397
15398 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
15399
15400 <pre>
15401
15402 config interface 'loopback'
15403         option ifname 'lo'
15404         option proto 'static'
15405         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
15406         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
15407
15408 config globals 'globals'
15409         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
15410
15411 config interface 'lan'
15412         option ifname 'eth0'
15413         option type 'bridge'
15414         option proto 'dhcp'
15415         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
15416         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
15417         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
15418         option ip6assign '60'
15419
15420 config interface 'mesh'
15421         option ifname 'adhoc0'
15422         option mtu '1528'
15423         option proto 'batadv'
15424         option mesh 'bat0'
15425 </pre>
15426
15427 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
15428 <pre>
15429
15430 config wifi-device 'radio0'
15431         option type 'mac80211'
15432         option channel '11'
15433         option hwmode '11ng'
15434         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
15435         option htmode 'HT20'
15436         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
15437         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
15438         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
15439         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
15440         option disabled '0'
15441
15442 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
15443         option device 'radio0'
15444         option ifname 'adhoc0'
15445         option network 'mesh'
15446         option encryption 'none'
15447         option mode 'adhoc'
15448         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
15449         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
15450 </pre>
15451 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
15452 <pre>
15453
15454 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
15455         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
15456         option 'aggregated_ogms'
15457         option 'ap_isolation'
15458         option 'bonding'
15459         option 'fragmentation'
15460         option 'gw_bandwidth'
15461         option 'gw_mode'
15462         option 'gw_sel_class'
15463         option 'log_level'
15464         option 'orig_interval'
15465         option 'vis_mode'
15466         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
15467         option 'distributed_arp_table'
15468         option 'network_coding'
15469         option 'hop_penalty'
15470
15471 # yet another batX instance
15472 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
15473 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
15474 </pre>
15475
15476 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
15477 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
15478 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
15479
15480       </div>
15481       <div class="tags">
15482
15483
15484         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>.
15485
15486
15487       </div>
15488     </div>
15489     <div class="padding"></div>
15490
15491     <div class="entry">
15492       <div class="title">
15493         <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>
15494       </div>
15495       <div class="date">
15496          2nd November 2013
15497       </div>
15498       <div class="body">
15499         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
15500 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
15501 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
15502 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
15503 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
15504
15505 <p><pre>
15506 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
15507 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
15508 # Provides:          rsyslog
15509 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
15510 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
15511 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
15512 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
15513 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
15514 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
15515 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
15516 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
15517 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
15518 ### END INIT INFO
15519 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
15520 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
15521 </pre></p>
15522
15523 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
15524 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
15525 info/comments.</p>
15526
15527 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
15528 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
15529
15530 <p><pre>
15531 #!/bin/sh
15532
15533 # Define LSB log_* functions.
15534 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
15535 # and status_of_proc is working.
15536 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
15537
15538 #
15539 # Function that starts the daemon/service
15540
15541 #
15542 do_start()
15543 {
15544         # Return
15545         #   0 if daemon has been started
15546         #   1 if daemon was already running
15547         #   2 if daemon could not be started
15548         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
15549                 || return 1
15550         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
15551                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
15552                 || return 2
15553         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
15554         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
15555         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
15556 }
15557
15558 #
15559 # Function that stops the daemon/service
15560 #
15561 do_stop()
15562 {
15563         # Return
15564         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
15565         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
15566         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
15567         #   other if a failure occurred
15568         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
15569         RETVAL="$?"
15570         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
15571         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
15572         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
15573         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
15574         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
15575         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
15576         # sleep for some time.
15577         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
15578         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
15579         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
15580         rm -f $PIDFILE
15581         return "$RETVAL"
15582 }
15583
15584 #
15585 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
15586 #
15587 do_reload() {
15588         #
15589         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
15590         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
15591         # then implement that here.
15592         #
15593         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
15594         return 0
15595 }
15596
15597 SCRIPTNAME=$1
15598 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
15599 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
15600 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
15601     script="$1"
15602     shift
15603     . $script
15604 else
15605     exit 0
15606 fi
15607
15608 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
15609 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
15610
15611 # Exit if the package is not installed
15612 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
15613
15614 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
15615 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
15616
15617 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
15618 . /lib/init/vars.sh
15619
15620 case "$1" in
15621   start)
15622         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
15623         do_start
15624         case "$?" in
15625                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
15626                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
15627         esac
15628         ;;
15629   stop)
15630         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
15631         do_stop
15632         case "$?" in
15633                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
15634                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
15635         esac
15636         ;;
15637   status)
15638         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
15639         ;;
15640   #reload|force-reload)
15641         #
15642         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
15643         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
15644         #
15645         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
15646         #do_reload
15647         #log_end_msg $?
15648         #;;
15649   restart|force-reload)
15650         #
15651         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
15652         # 'force-reload' alias
15653         #
15654         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
15655         do_stop
15656         case "$?" in
15657           0|1)
15658                 do_start
15659                 case "$?" in
15660                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
15661                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
15662                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
15663                 esac
15664                 ;;
15665           *)
15666                 # Failed to stop
15667                 log_end_msg 1
15668                 ;;
15669         esac
15670         ;;
15671   *)
15672         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
15673         exit 3
15674         ;;
15675 esac
15676
15677 :
15678 </pre></p>
15679
15680 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
15681 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
15682 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
15683 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
15684
15685 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
15686 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
15687 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
15688 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
15689 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
15690
15691       </div>
15692       <div class="tags">
15693
15694
15695         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>.
15696
15697
15698       </div>
15699     </div>
15700     <div class="padding"></div>
15701
15702     <div class="entry">
15703       <div class="title">
15704         <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>
15705       </div>
15706       <div class="date">
15707          1st November 2013
15708       </div>
15709       <div class="body">
15710         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
15711 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
15712 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
15713 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
15714 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
15715 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
15716 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
15717 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
15718 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
15719 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
15720 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
15721 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
15722
15723 <p>The source is now available from
15724 <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>
15725
15726       </div>
15727       <div class="tags">
15728
15729
15730         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15731
15732
15733       </div>
15734     </div>
15735     <div class="padding"></div>
15736
15737     <div class="entry">
15738       <div class="title">
15739         <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>
15740       </div>
15741       <div class="date">
15742         27th October 2013
15743       </div>
15744       <div class="body">
15745         <p>The
15746 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
15747 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
15748 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
15749 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
15750 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
15751 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
15752 of a plan to simplify the build system for
15753 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
15754 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
15755 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
15756 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
15757 Raspberry Pi.</p>
15758
15759 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
15760 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
15761 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
15762 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
15763 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
15764 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
15765 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
15766 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
15767 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
15768 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
15769 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
15770 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
15771 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
15772 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
15773 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
15774 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
15775 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
15776 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
15777 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
15778 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
15779 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
15780 available from
15781 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
15782 upstream project page</a>.</p>
15783
15784 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
15785 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
15786 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
15787 list:</p>
15788
15789 <p><pre>
15790 #!/bin/sh
15791 set -e # Exit on first error
15792 rootdir="$1"
15793 cd "$rootdir"
15794 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
15795 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
15796 EOF
15797 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
15798 # install a kernel somewhere too.
15799 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
15800     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
15801 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
15802 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
15803 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
15804 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
15805 </pre></p>
15806
15807 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
15808 to build the image:</p>
15809
15810 <pre>
15811 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
15812     --variant minbase \
15813     --arch armel \
15814     --distribution jessie \
15815     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
15816     --image test.img \
15817     --size 600M \
15818     --bootsize 64M \
15819     --boottype vfat \
15820     --log-level debug \
15821     --verbose \
15822     --no-kernel \
15823     --no-extlinux \
15824     --root-password raspberry \
15825     --hostname raspberrypi \
15826     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
15827     --customize `pwd`/customize \
15828     --package netbase \
15829     --package git-core \
15830     --package binutils \
15831     --package ca-certificates \
15832     --package wget \
15833     --package kmod
15834 </pre></p>
15835
15836 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
15837 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
15838 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
15839 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
15840 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
15841 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
15842 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
15843
15844 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
15845 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
15846 build dependency list.</p>
15847
15848 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
15849 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
15850 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
15851 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
15852
15853       </div>
15854       <div class="tags">
15855
15856
15857         Tags: <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>.
15858
15859
15860       </div>
15861     </div>
15862     <div class="padding"></div>
15863
15864     <div class="entry">
15865       <div class="title">
15866         <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>
15867       </div>
15868       <div class="date">
15869         21st October 2013
15870       </div>
15871       <div class="body">
15872         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
15873 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
15874 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
15875 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
15876 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
15877 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
15878 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
15879 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
15880
15881 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
15882 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
15883 instead, I started playing with a
15884 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
15885 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
15886 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
15887 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
15888 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
15889 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
15890 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
15891 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
15892 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
15893 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
15894 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
15895 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
15896 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
15897 every client on the local network.</p>
15898
15899 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
15900 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
15901 and a script
15902 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
15903 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
15904 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
15905 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
15906 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
15907 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
15908 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
15909 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
15910 support.</p>
15911
15912 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
15913 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
15914
15915 <p><pre>
15916 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
15917     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
15918 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
15919 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
15920 %
15921 </pre></p>
15922
15923 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
15924 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
15925 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
15926 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
15927 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
15928 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
15929
15930 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
15931 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
15932 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
15933
15934 <p><table>
15935
15936 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
15937 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
15938 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
15939 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
15940 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
15941 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
15942
15943 </table></p>
15944
15945 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
15946 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
15947 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
15948 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
15949 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
15950 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
15951 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
15952
15953       </div>
15954       <div class="tags">
15955
15956
15957         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>.
15958
15959
15960       </div>
15961     </div>
15962     <div class="padding"></div>
15963
15964     <div class="entry">
15965       <div class="title">
15966         <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>
15967       </div>
15968       <div class="date">
15969         19th October 2013
15970       </div>
15971       <div class="body">
15972         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
15973 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
15974 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
15975 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
15976 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
15977 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
15978 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
15979 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
15980
15981       </div>
15982       <div class="tags">
15983
15984
15985         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>.
15986
15987
15988       </div>
15989     </div>
15990     <div class="padding"></div>
15991
15992     <div class="entry">
15993       <div class="title">
15994         <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>
15995       </div>
15996       <div class="date">
15997         15th October 2013
15998       </div>
15999       <div class="body">
16000         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
16001 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
16002 these. :)</p>
16003
16004 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
16005 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
16006 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
16007 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
16008 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
16009 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
16010 hope you will to. :)</p>
16011
16012 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
16013 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
16014 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
16015 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
16016 donated.  Are you next?</p>
16017
16018 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
16019 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
16020 statement under the heading
16021 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
16022 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
16023 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
16024 too.</p>
16025
16026       </div>
16027       <div class="tags">
16028
16029
16030         Tags: <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>.
16031
16032
16033       </div>
16034     </div>
16035     <div class="padding"></div>
16036
16037     <div class="entry">
16038       <div class="title">
16039         <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>
16040       </div>
16041       <div class="date">
16042         11th October 2013
16043       </div>
16044       <div class="body">
16045         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
16046 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
16047 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
16048 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
16049 successful examples like
16050 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
16051 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
16052 (see
16053 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
16054 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
16055 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
16056 can be seen from their
16057 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
16058 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
16059 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
16060 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
16061 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
16062
16063 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
16064 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
16065 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
16066 my recent involvement in
16067 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
16068 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
16069 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
16070 when possible, given that most communication between people are
16071 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
16072 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
16073 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
16074 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
16075 important over the years.</p>
16076
16077 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
16078 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
16079 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
16080 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
16081 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
16082 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
16083 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
16084 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
16085 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
16086 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
16087 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
16088 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
16089 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
16090 speakers about this talk (from
16091 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
16092
16093 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
16094
16095 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
16096 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
16097 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
16098 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
16099 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
16100 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
16101 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
16102 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
16103 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
16104 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
16105 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
16106 that project (from
16107 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
16108
16109 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
16110
16111 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
16112 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
16113 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
16114 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
16115 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
16116 based community mesh networks.</p>
16117
16118 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
16119 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
16120 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
16121 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
16122 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
16123 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
16124 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
16125 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
16126 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
16127
16128 <p><table>
16129 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
16130 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
16131 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
16132 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
16133 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
16134 </table></p>
16135
16136 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
16137 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
16138 VillageTelco about
16139 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
16140 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
16141 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
16142 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
16143 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
16144 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
16145
16146 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
16147 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
16148 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
16149 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
16150
16151 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
16152 us on IRC, either channel
16153 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
16154 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
16155 irc.freenode.net.</p>
16156
16157 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
16158 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
16159 and Innovation called
16160 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
16161 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
16162 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
16163 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
16164 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
16165 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
16166 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
16167 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
16168
16169 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
16170 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
16171 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
16172 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
16173 mesh system.</p>
16174
16175       </div>
16176       <div class="tags">
16177
16178
16179         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>.
16180
16181
16182       </div>
16183     </div>
16184     <div class="padding"></div>
16185
16186     <div class="entry">
16187       <div class="title">
16188         <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>
16189       </div>
16190       <div class="date">
16191          8th October 2013
16192       </div>
16193       <div class="body">
16194         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
16195 Salvador had published a
16196 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
16197 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
16198 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
16199 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
16200 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
16201 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
16202 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
16203 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
16204 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
16205 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
16206 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
16207 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
16208 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
16209 computers without hard drives by installing one central
16210 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
16211
16212 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
16213
16214 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
16215
16216 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
16217 me know. :)</p>
16218
16219       </div>
16220       <div class="tags">
16221
16222
16223         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
16224
16225
16226       </div>
16227     </div>
16228     <div class="padding"></div>
16229
16230     <div class="entry">
16231       <div class="title">
16232         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
16233       </div>
16234       <div class="date">
16235         29th September 2013
16236       </div>
16237       <div class="body">
16238         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
16239 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
16240 complete announcement text can be found at
16241 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
16242 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
16243
16244 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
16245 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
16246 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
16247 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
16248
16249       </div>
16250       <div class="tags">
16251
16252
16253         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16254
16255
16256       </div>
16257     </div>
16258     <div class="padding"></div>
16259
16260     <div class="entry">
16261       <div class="title">
16262         <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>
16263       </div>
16264       <div class="date">
16265         27th September 2013
16266       </div>
16267       <div class="body">
16268         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
16269 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
16270 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
16271 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
16272
16273 <ul>
16274
16275 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
16276 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
16277
16278 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
16279 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
16280
16281 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
16282 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
16283 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
16284 (Youtube)</li>
16285
16286 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
16287 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
16288
16289 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
16290 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
16291
16292 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
16293 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
16294 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
16295
16296 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
16297 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
16298 (Youtube)</li>
16299
16300 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
16301 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
16302
16303 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
16304 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
16305
16306 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
16307 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
16308 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
16309
16310 </ul>
16311
16312 <p>A larger list is available from
16313 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
16314 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
16315
16316 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
16317 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
16318 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
16319 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
16320 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
16321 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
16322 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
16323 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
16324 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
16325 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
16326 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
16327
16328       </div>
16329       <div class="tags">
16330
16331
16332         Tags: <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>.
16333
16334
16335       </div>
16336     </div>
16337     <div class="padding"></div>
16338
16339     <div class="entry">
16340       <div class="title">
16341         <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>
16342       </div>
16343       <div class="date">
16344         16th September 2013
16345       </div>
16346       <div class="body">
16347         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
16348 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
16349
16350 <blockquote>
16351 <p>Hi,</p>
16352
16353 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
16354 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
16355 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
16356
16357 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
16358 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
16359 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
16360 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
16361
16362 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
16363 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
16364
16365 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
16366 compared to beta1:</p>
16367
16368 <ul>
16369
16370 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
16371 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
16372 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
16373 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
16374 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
16375 main server.</li>
16376 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
16377 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
16378 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
16379 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
16380 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
16381
16382 </ul>
16383
16384 <p>Where to get it:</p>
16385
16386 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16387
16388 <ul>
16389 <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>
16390 <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>
16391 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
16392 </ul>
16393
16394 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
16395
16396 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
16397 <ul>
16398 <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>
16399 <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>
16400 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
16401 </ul>
16402
16403 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
16404
16405 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
16406 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
16407 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
16408 as the other isos.</p>
16409
16410 <p>How to report bugs</p>
16411
16412 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
16413 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
16414
16415
16416 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
16417
16418 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
16419 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
16420 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
16421 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
16422 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
16423 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
16424 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
16425 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
16426 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
16427 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
16428 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
16429 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
16430 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
16431
16432 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
16433 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
16434 Squeeze release.</p>
16435
16436 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
16437
16438 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
16439 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
16440 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
16441 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
16442 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
16443 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
16444 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
16445 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
16446 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
16447 directory.</p>
16448
16449
16450 <p>cheers,
16451 <br>        Holger</p>
16452 </blockquote>
16453
16454       </div>
16455       <div class="tags">
16456
16457
16458         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16459
16460
16461       </div>
16462     </div>
16463     <div class="padding"></div>
16464
16465     <div class="entry">
16466       <div class="title">
16467         <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>
16468       </div>
16469       <div class="date">
16470         10th September 2013
16471       </div>
16472       <div class="body">
16473         <p>I was introduced to the
16474 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
16475 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
16476 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
16477 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
16478 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
16479 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
16480 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
16481 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
16482
16483 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
16484 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
16485 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
16486 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
16487 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
16488
16489 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
16490 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
16491 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
16492 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
16493 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
16494 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
16495 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
16496 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
16497 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
16498 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
16499 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
16500 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
16501 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
16502 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
16503 missing in Debian).</p>
16504
16505 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
16506 scripts
16507 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
16508 and a administrative web interface
16509 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
16510 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
16511 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
16512 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
16513 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
16514 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
16515 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
16516 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
16517 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
16518 this is really working yet, see
16519 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
16520 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
16521 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
16522 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
16523 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
16524 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
16525 with lots of half baked features.</p>
16526
16527 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
16528 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
16529 at.</p>
16530
16531 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
16532
16533 <ol>
16534
16535 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
16536 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
16537 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
16538 to the Debian installer:<p>
16539 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
16540
16541 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
16542 install on.</li>
16543
16544 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
16545 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
16546
16547 </ol>
16548
16549 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
16550
16551 <ol>
16552
16553 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
16554 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
16555 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
16556 <pre>
16557 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
16558 </pre></li>
16559 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
16560 <pre>
16561 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
16562    apt-key add -
16563 apt-get update
16564 apt-get install freedombox-setup
16565 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
16566 </pre></li>
16567 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
16568
16569 </ol>
16570
16571 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
16572 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
16573 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
16574 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
16575 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
16576
16577 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
16578 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
16579 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
16580 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
16581
16582 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
16583 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
16584 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
16585 irc.debian.org and the
16586 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
16587 mailing list</a>.</p>
16588
16589 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
16590 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
16591 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
16592 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
16593 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
16594 default password is 'secret'.</p>
16595
16596       </div>
16597       <div class="tags">
16598
16599
16600         Tags: <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>.
16601
16602
16603       </div>
16604     </div>
16605     <div class="padding"></div>
16606
16607     <div class="entry">
16608       <div class="title">
16609         <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>
16610       </div>
16611       <div class="date">
16612         22nd August 2013
16613       </div>
16614       <div class="body">
16615         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
16616 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
16617 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
16618
16619 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
16620
16621 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16622 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
16623
16624 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16625
16626 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
16627 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16628 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16629 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
16630 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16631 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16632 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16633 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
16634 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
16635 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
16636 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
16637 desktop contains
16638 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
16639 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
16640 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
16641 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
16642
16643 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
16644 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
16645 release.</p>
16646
16647 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
16648 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
16649 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
16650 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
16651 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
16652 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
16653 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
16654 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
16655 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
16656 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
16657 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
16658
16659 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16660
16661 <ul>
16662
16663 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
16664     work also without a attached tty.</li>
16665 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
16666     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
16667     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
16668     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
16669     required).</li>
16670
16671 </ul>
16672
16673 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16674
16675 <ul>
16676
16677 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
16678 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
16679 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
16680 stick ISO image.</li>
16681 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
16682 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
16683 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
16684     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
16685     cope with this.</li>
16686 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
16687 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
16688     empty password hashes.</li>
16689 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
16690     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
16691     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
16692
16693 </ul>
16694
16695 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
16696
16697 <ul>
16698
16699 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
16700     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
16701 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
16702     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
16703
16704 </ul>
16705
16706 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16707
16708 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16709
16710 <ul>
16711
16712 <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>
16713
16714 <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>
16715
16716 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
16717
16718 </ul>
16719
16720 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
16721 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
16722
16723 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
16724
16725 <ul>
16726
16727 <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>
16728 <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>
16729 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
16730
16731 </ul>
16732
16733 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
16734 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
16735
16736
16737 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16738
16739 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
16740
16741       </div>
16742       <div class="tags">
16743
16744
16745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16746
16747
16748       </div>
16749     </div>
16750     <div class="padding"></div>
16751
16752     <div class="entry">
16753       <div class="title">
16754         <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>
16755       </div>
16756       <div class="date">
16757         18th August 2013
16758       </div>
16759       <div class="body">
16760         <p>Earlier, I reported about
16761 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
16762 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
16763 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
16764 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
16765 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
16766 currently on the disk.</p>
16767
16768 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
16769 <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>
16770 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
16771 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
16772 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
16773 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
16774 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
16775 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
16776 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
16777 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
16778 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
16779 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
16780 the broken disks.</p>
16781
16782       </div>
16783       <div class="tags">
16784
16785
16786         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16787
16788
16789       </div>
16790     </div>
16791     <div class="padding"></div>
16792
16793     <div class="entry">
16794       <div class="title">
16795         <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>
16796       </div>
16797       <div class="date">
16798          2nd August 2013
16799       </div>
16800       <div class="body">
16801         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
16802 have worked on a Norwegian
16803 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
16804 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
16805 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
16806 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
16807 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
16808 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
16809 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
16810 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
16811 progress of the translation:</p>
16812
16813 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
16814
16815 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
16816 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
16817 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
16818 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
16819 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
16820 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
16821 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
16822 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
16823 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
16824 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
16825 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
16826
16827 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
16828 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
16829 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
16830 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
16831 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
16832 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
16833 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
16834 project files currently available from
16835 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
16836
16837 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
16838 the updated
16839 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
16840 and
16841 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
16842 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
16843 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
16844 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
16845
16846       </div>
16847       <div class="tags">
16848
16849
16850         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>.
16851
16852
16853       </div>
16854     </div>
16855     <div class="padding"></div>
16856
16857     <div class="entry">
16858       <div class="title">
16859         <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>
16860       </div>
16861       <div class="date">
16862         27th July 2013
16863       </div>
16864       <div class="body">
16865         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
16866 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
16867
16868 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
16869 2013-07-27</strong></p>
16870
16871 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16872 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
16873
16874 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16875
16876 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
16877 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16878 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16879 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
16880 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16881 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16882 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16883 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
16884 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
16885 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
16886 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
16887 desktop contains
16888 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
16889 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
16890 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
16891 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
16892
16893 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
16894 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
16895 Squeeze release.</p>
16896
16897 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
16898 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
16899 release.</p>
16900
16901 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16902
16903 <ul>
16904
16905 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
16906    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
16907 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
16908    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
16909    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
16910    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
16911    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
16912 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
16913 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
16914 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
16915    crash bugs.</li>
16916
16917 </ul>
16918
16919 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16920
16921 <ul>
16922
16923 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
16924    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
16925 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
16926    netinst CD.</li>
16927 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
16928    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
16929 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
16930    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
16931    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
16932 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
16933    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
16934    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
16935 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
16936    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
16937    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
16938 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
16939    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
16940 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
16941
16942 </ul>
16943
16944 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
16945
16946 <ul>
16947
16948 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
16949 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
16950     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
16951 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
16952
16953 </ul>
16954
16955 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16956
16957 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16958
16959 <ul>
16960
16961 <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>
16962
16963 <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>
16964
16965 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
16966
16967 </ul>
16968
16969 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
16970 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
16971
16972 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
16973
16974 <ul>
16975
16976 <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>
16977 <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>
16978 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
16979
16980 </ul>
16981
16982 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
16983 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
16984
16985
16986 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16987
16988 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
16989
16990       </div>
16991       <div class="tags">
16992
16993
16994         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16995
16996
16997       </div>
16998     </div>
16999     <div class="padding"></div>
17000
17001     <div class="entry">
17002       <div class="title">
17003         <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>
17004       </div>
17005       <div class="date">
17006         17th July 2013
17007       </div>
17008       <div class="body">
17009         <p>Today I switched to
17010 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
17011 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
17012 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
17013 <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
17014 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
17015 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
17016 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
17017 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
17018 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
17019 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
17020 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
17021 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
17022 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
17023 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
17024 station from now on.</p>
17025
17026 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
17027 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
17028 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
17029 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
17030 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
17031 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
17032 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
17033 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
17034 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
17035 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
17036 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
17037 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
17038
17039 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
17040 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
17041 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
17042 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
17043 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
17044 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
17045 parameters are tuned:</p>
17046
17047 <ul>
17048
17049 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
17050     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
17051
17052 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
17053     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
17054     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
17055
17056 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
17057     systems.</li>
17058
17059 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
17060     /etc/fstab.</li>
17061
17062 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
17063
17064 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
17065     cron.daily).</li>
17066
17067 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
17068     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
17069
17070 </ul>
17071
17072 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
17073 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
17074 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
17075 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
17076 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
17077 from getting the data on the disk (see
17078 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
17079 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
17080 right thing to do.</p>
17081
17082 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
17083 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
17084 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
17085
17086 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
17087 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
17088 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
17089 instead of during my work.</p>
17090
17091 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
17092 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
17093
17094 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
17095 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
17096 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
17097
17098 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
17099 there.</p>
17100
17101 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
17102 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
17103 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
17104 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
17105 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
17106 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
17107 back.</p>
17108
17109       </div>
17110       <div class="tags">
17111
17112
17113         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17114
17115
17116       </div>
17117     </div>
17118     <div class="padding"></div>
17119
17120     <div class="entry">
17121       <div class="title">
17122         <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>
17123       </div>
17124       <div class="date">
17125         10th July 2013
17126       </div>
17127       <div class="body">
17128         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
17129 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
17130 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
17131 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
17132 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
17133 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
17134 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
17135 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
17136
17137 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
17138 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
17139 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
17140 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
17141 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
17142 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
17143 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
17144 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
17145 lock up when I download a new
17146 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
17147 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
17148 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
17149
17150 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
17151 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
17152 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
17153 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
17154 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
17155 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
17156
17157 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
17158 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
17159 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
17160 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
17161 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
17162 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
17163
17164 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
17165 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
17166 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
17167 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
17168 exist).</p>
17169
17170       </div>
17171       <div class="tags">
17172
17173
17174         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17175
17176
17177       </div>
17178     </div>
17179     <div class="padding"></div>
17180
17181     <div class="entry">
17182       <div class="title">
17183         <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>
17184       </div>
17185       <div class="date">
17186          9th July 2013
17187       </div>
17188       <div class="body">
17189         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
17190 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
17191 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
17192 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
17193 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
17194 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
17195 Bitraf</a>.</p>
17196
17197 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
17198 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
17199 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
17200 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
17201 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
17202
17203       </div>
17204       <div class="tags">
17205
17206
17207         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>.
17208
17209
17210       </div>
17211     </div>
17212     <div class="padding"></div>
17213
17214     <div class="entry">
17215       <div class="title">
17216         <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>
17217       </div>
17218       <div class="date">
17219          5th July 2013
17220       </div>
17221       <div class="body">
17222         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
17223 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
17224 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
17225 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
17226 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
17227 ended up picking a
17228 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
17229 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
17230 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
17231 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
17232 on that below.</p>
17233
17234 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
17235 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
17236 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
17237 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
17238 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
17239 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
17240 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
17241 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
17242 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
17243
17244 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
17245 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
17246 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
17247 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
17248 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
17249 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
17250 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
17251
17252 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
17253 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
17254
17255 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
17256 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
17257 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
17258 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
17259 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
17260 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
17261 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
17262 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
17263 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
17264 kernel developers as
17265 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
17266 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
17267 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
17268 Lenovo forums, both for
17269 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
17270 2012-11-10</a> and for
17271 <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
17272 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
17273 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
17274 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
17275 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
17276 There is even a
17277 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
17278 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
17279 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
17280
17281 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
17282 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
17283 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
17284 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
17285 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
17286 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
17287 fixed. :)</p>
17288
17289       </div>
17290       <div class="tags">
17291
17292
17293         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17294
17295
17296       </div>
17297     </div>
17298     <div class="padding"></div>
17299
17300     <div class="entry">
17301       <div class="title">
17302         <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>
17303       </div>
17304       <div class="date">
17305          4th July 2013
17306       </div>
17307       <div class="body">
17308         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
17309 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
17310 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
17311 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
17312 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
17313 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
17314 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
17315 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
17316 with an expencive door stop.</p>
17317
17318 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
17319 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
17320 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
17321 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
17322 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
17323 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
17324 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
17325
17326 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
17327 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
17328 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
17329 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
17330 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
17331 new laptop now. :)</p>
17332
17333 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
17334
17335       </div>
17336       <div class="tags">
17337
17338
17339         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17340
17341
17342       </div>
17343     </div>
17344     <div class="padding"></div>
17345
17346     <div class="entry">
17347       <div class="title">
17348         <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>
17349       </div>
17350       <div class="date">
17351          3rd July 2013
17352       </div>
17353       <div class="body">
17354         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
17355 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
17356
17357 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
17358 2013-07-03</strong></p>
17359
17360 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
17361 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
17362
17363 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
17364
17365 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
17366 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
17367 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
17368 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
17369 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
17370 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
17371 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
17372 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
17373 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
17374 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
17375 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
17376 desktop contains
17377 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
17378 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
17379 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
17380 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
17381
17382 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
17383 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
17384 Squeeze release.</p>
17385
17386 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
17387 <ul>
17388   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
17389   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
17390     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
17391     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
17392   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
17393     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
17394     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
17395   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
17396     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
17397     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
17398     too.</li>
17399   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
17400     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
17401 </ul>
17402 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
17403 <ul>
17404   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
17405   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
17406   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
17407     up for some language options.</li>
17408   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
17409   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
17410   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
17411     d-i is doing it.</li>
17412   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
17413     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
17414   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
17415     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
17416     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
17417   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
17418     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
17419   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
17420   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
17421     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
17422   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
17423     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
17424 </ul>
17425 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
17426 <ul>
17427   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
17428     available yet (698840).</li>
17429   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
17430 </ul>
17431 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
17432
17433 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
17434 <ul>
17435   <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>
17436   <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>
17437   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
17438 </ul>
17439
17440 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
17441 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
17442
17443 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
17444 <ul>
17445   <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>
17446   <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>
17447   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
17448 </ul>
17449
17450 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
17451 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
17452
17453 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
17454
17455 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
17456
17457       </div>
17458       <div class="tags">
17459
17460
17461         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17462
17463
17464       </div>
17465     </div>
17466     <div class="padding"></div>
17467
17468     <div class="entry">
17469       <div class="title">
17470         <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>
17471       </div>
17472       <div class="date">
17473         25th June 2013
17474       </div>
17475       <div class="body">
17476         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
17477 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
17478 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
17479 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
17480 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
17481 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
17482 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
17483 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
17484 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
17485 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
17486 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
17487
17488 <p><pre>
17489 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
17490 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
17491 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
17492 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
17493 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
17494 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
17495 firmware-ipw2x00
17496 firmware-ipw2x00
17497 Preconfiguring packages ...
17498 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
17499 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
17500 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
17501 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
17502 #
17503 </pre></p>
17504
17505 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
17506 printed instead:</p>
17507
17508 <p><pre>
17509 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
17510 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
17511 #
17512 </pre></p>
17513
17514 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
17515 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
17516
17517 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
17518 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
17519 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
17520 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
17521 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
17522 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
17523 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
17524 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
17525 machine.</p>
17526
17527 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
17528 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
17529 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
17530 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
17531 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
17532 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
17533
17534       </div>
17535       <div class="tags">
17536
17537
17538         Tags: <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>.
17539
17540
17541       </div>
17542     </div>
17543     <div class="padding"></div>
17544
17545     <div class="entry">
17546       <div class="title">
17547         <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>
17548       </div>
17549       <div class="date">
17550         22nd June 2013
17551       </div>
17552       <div class="body">
17553         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17554 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
17555 which check that services are running, working, and return the
17556 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
17557 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
17558 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
17559 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
17560 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
17561 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
17562
17563 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
17564 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
17565 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
17566 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
17567 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
17568 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
17569 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
17570 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
17571 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
17572 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
17573 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
17574 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
17575 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
17576 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
17577
17578 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
17579 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
17580 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
17581 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
17582 the problem.</p>
17583
17584 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
17585 please join us on
17586 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
17587 irc.debian.org</a> and the
17588 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
17589 list.</p>
17590
17591       </div>
17592       <div class="tags">
17593
17594
17595         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17596
17597
17598       </div>
17599     </div>
17600     <div class="padding"></div>
17601
17602     <div class="entry">
17603       <div class="title">
17604         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
17605       </div>
17606       <div class="date">
17607         17th June 2013
17608       </div>
17609       <div class="body">
17610         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
17611 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
17612 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
17613 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
17614 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
17615 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
17616 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
17617 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
17618
17619 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17620
17621 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
17622 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
17623 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
17624 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
17625 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
17626 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
17627 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
17628 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
17629 field.</p>
17630
17631 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
17632 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
17633 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
17634 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
17635 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
17636 the only one we have in our country.</p>
17637
17638 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
17639 project?</strong></p>
17640
17641 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
17642 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
17643 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
17644 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
17645 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
17646 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
17647 ways to contribute.</p>
17648
17649 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
17650 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
17651 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
17652 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
17653 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
17654 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
17655 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
17656 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
17657 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
17658 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
17659
17660 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17661 Edu?</strong></p>
17662
17663 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
17664 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
17665 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
17666 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
17667 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
17668 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
17669 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
17670 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
17671
17672 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
17673 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
17674 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
17675 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
17676 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
17677 project.</p>
17678
17679 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17680 Edu?</strong></p>
17681
17682 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
17683 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
17684 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
17685 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
17686 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
17687 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
17688 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
17689 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
17690 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
17691
17692 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
17693 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
17694 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
17695 on.</p>
17696
17697 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17698
17699 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
17700 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
17701 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
17702 Enlightenment project a lot!),
17703 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
17704 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
17705 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
17706 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
17707 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
17708
17709 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17710 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17711
17712 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
17713 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
17714 that:</p>
17715
17716 <ul>
17717
17718 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
17719
17720 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
17721     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
17722     of teenagers more?</li>
17723
17724 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
17725     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
17726     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
17727     them!)</li>
17728
17729 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
17730     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
17731     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
17732
17733 </ul>
17734
17735 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
17736 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
17737 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
17738 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
17739 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
17740
17741       </div>
17742       <div class="tags">
17743
17744
17745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17746
17747
17748       </div>
17749     </div>
17750     <div class="padding"></div>
17751
17752     <div class="entry">
17753       <div class="title">
17754         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
17755       </div>
17756       <div class="date">
17757         12th June 2013
17758       </div>
17759       <div class="body">
17760         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
17761 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
17762 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
17763 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
17764 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
17765 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
17766
17767 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17768
17769 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
17770 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
17771 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
17772
17773 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
17774 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
17775 each other.</p>
17776
17777 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
17778 project?</strong></p>
17779
17780 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
17781 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
17782 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
17783 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
17784 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
17785 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
17786 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
17787 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
17788 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
17789 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
17790 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
17791 we'll get there one day.</p>
17792
17793 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17794 Edu?</strong></p>
17795
17796 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
17797 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
17798 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
17799 very high quality work.</p>
17800
17801 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
17802 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
17803 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
17804 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
17805 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
17806
17807 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17808 Edu?</strong></p>
17809
17810 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
17811 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
17812 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
17813
17814 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
17815 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
17816 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
17817 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
17818 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
17819 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
17820 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
17821 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
17822 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
17823 currently.</p>
17824
17825 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
17826 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
17827 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
17828 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
17829 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
17830 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
17831 autonomous.</p>
17832
17833 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17834
17835 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
17836 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
17837 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
17838 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
17839 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
17840
17841 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
17842 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
17843 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
17844 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
17845 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
17846 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
17847 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
17848 X.</p>
17849
17850 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
17851 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
17852 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
17853 it :p)
17854
17855 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17856 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17857
17858 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
17859 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
17860 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
17861 that.</p>
17862
17863 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
17864 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
17865 advantage of that.</p>
17866
17867 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
17868 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
17869 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
17870 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
17871 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
17872 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
17873 best solution for them.</p>
17874
17875 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
17876 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
17877 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
17878
17879       </div>
17880       <div class="tags">
17881
17882
17883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17884
17885
17886       </div>
17887     </div>
17888     <div class="padding"></div>
17889
17890     <div class="entry">
17891       <div class="title">
17892         <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>
17893       </div>
17894       <div class="date">
17895         11th June 2013
17896       </div>
17897       <div class="body">
17898         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
17899 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
17900 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
17901 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
17902 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
17903 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
17904 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
17905 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
17906 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
17907 i915 driver used by the
17908 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
17909 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
17910
17911 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
17912 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
17913 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
17914 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
17915 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
17916
17917 <pre>
17918 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
17919 update-initramfs -u -k all
17920 </pre>
17921
17922 <p>Since March 2012 there is
17923 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
17924 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
17925 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
17926 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
17927 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
17928 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
17929 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
17930 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
17931 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
17932 number.</p>
17933
17934 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
17935 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
17936
17937 <p><pre>
17938 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
17939     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
17940     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
17941  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
17942  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
17943     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
17944  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
17945     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
17946  Latency: 0
17947  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
17948  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
17949  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
17950  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
17951  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
17952  Capabilities: <access denied>
17953  Kernel driver in use: i915
17954 </pre></p>
17955
17956 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
17957
17958 <p><pre>
17959 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
17960        ...
17961         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
17962         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
17963        ...
17964 }
17965 </pre></p>
17966
17967 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
17968 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
17969 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
17970 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
17971 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
17972 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
17973 yet shown up in
17974 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
17975 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
17976 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
17977 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
17978 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
17979 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
17980
17981 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
17982 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
17983 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
17984 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
17985 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
17986 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
17987 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
17988 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
17989 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
17990 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
17991 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
17992 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
17993
17994 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
17995 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
17996 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
17997 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
17998 backlight.</p>
17999
18000       </div>
18001       <div class="tags">
18002
18003
18004         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18005
18006
18007       </div>
18008     </div>
18009     <div class="padding"></div>
18010
18011     <div class="entry">
18012       <div class="title">
18013         <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>
18014       </div>
18015       <div class="date">
18016         10th June 2013
18017       </div>
18018       <div class="body">
18019         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
18020 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
18021
18022 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
18023 2013-06-10</strong></p>
18024
18025 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
18026 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
18027
18028 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
18029
18030 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
18031 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
18032 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
18033 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
18034 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
18035 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
18036 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
18037 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
18038 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
18039 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
18040 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
18041 desktop contains
18042 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
18043 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
18044 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
18045 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
18046
18047 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
18048 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
18049 Squeeze release.</p>
18050
18051 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
18052
18053 <ul>
18054
18055 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
18056 <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).
18057 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
18058 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
18059 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
18060
18061 </ul>
18062
18063 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
18064
18065 <ul>
18066
18067 <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.
18068 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
18069 <li>New Romanian translation.
18070 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
18071 <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).
18072 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
18073 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
18074 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
18075 <li>More testsuite tests.
18076 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
18077 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
18078
18079 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
18080 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
18081
18082 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
18083 them up with GOsa².</li>
18084
18085 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
18086
18087 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
18088 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
18089 entered password). </li>
18090
18091 </ul>
18092
18093 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
18094
18095 <ul>
18096
18097 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
18098
18099 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
18100 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
18101 missing import feature).</li>
18102
18103 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
18104
18105 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
18106 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
18107 unfixed.</li>
18108
18109 </ul>
18110
18111 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
18112
18113 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
18114
18115 <ul>
18116
18117 <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>
18118
18119 <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>
18120
18121 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
18122
18123 </ul>
18124
18125 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
18126 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
18127
18128 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
18129
18130 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
18131
18132       </div>
18133       <div class="tags">
18134
18135
18136         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18137
18138
18139       </div>
18140     </div>
18141     <div class="padding"></div>
18142
18143     <div class="entry">
18144       <div class="title">
18145         <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>
18146       </div>
18147       <div class="date">
18148          5th June 2013
18149       </div>
18150       <div class="body">
18151         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
18152 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
18153 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
18154 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
18155 the project:
18156
18157 <ol>
18158
18159 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
18160   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
18161   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
18162   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
18163   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
18164
18165 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
18166   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
18167   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
18168   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
18169   #698840</a>.</li>
18170
18171 </ol>
18172
18173 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
18174 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
18175 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
18176
18177       </div>
18178       <div class="tags">
18179
18180
18181         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18182
18183
18184       </div>
18185     </div>
18186     <div class="padding"></div>
18187
18188     <div class="entry">
18189       <div class="title">
18190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
18191       </div>
18192       <div class="date">
18193          4th June 2013
18194       </div>
18195       <div class="body">
18196         <p>It has been a while since my last English
18197 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18198 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
18199 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
18200 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
18201 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
18202
18203 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18204
18205 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
18206 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
18207 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
18208 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
18209
18210 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
18211 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
18212 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
18213
18214 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
18215 project?</strong></p>
18216
18217 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
18218 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
18219 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
18220 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
18221 manual.
18222
18223 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
18224 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
18225 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
18226 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
18227
18228 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
18229 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
18230 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
18231 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
18232 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
18233 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
18234 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
18235 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
18236 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
18237 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
18238
18239 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
18240 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
18241 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
18242 beautiful project.</p>
18243
18244 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18245 Edu?</strong></p>
18246
18247 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
18248 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
18249 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
18250
18251 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
18252 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
18253 of educational free software.</p>
18254
18255 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18256 Edu?</strong></p>
18257
18258 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
18259 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
18260 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
18261 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
18262 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
18263
18264 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
18265 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
18266 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
18267 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
18268 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
18269 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
18270 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
18271 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
18272
18273 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18274
18275 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
18276 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
18277 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
18278 also using the mathematical software
18279 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
18280 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
18281 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
18282
18283 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
18284 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
18285 statistics?</strong></p>
18286
18287 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
18288 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
18289 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
18290 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
18291
18292 <ul>
18293
18294 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
18295 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
18296 constructions in planar geometry
18297
18298 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
18299 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
18300 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
18301
18302 </ul>
18303
18304 <p>I like also
18305 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
18306 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
18307 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
18308
18309 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18310 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18311
18312 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
18313
18314 <ul>
18315
18316 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
18317
18318 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
18319     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
18320     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
18321
18322 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
18323
18324 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
18325     system.</li>
18326
18327 </ul>
18328
18329       </div>
18330       <div class="tags">
18331
18332
18333         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18334
18335
18336       </div>
18337     </div>
18338     <div class="padding"></div>
18339
18340     <div class="entry">
18341       <div class="title">
18342         <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>
18343       </div>
18344       <div class="date">
18345          1st June 2013
18346       </div>
18347       <div class="body">
18348         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
18349 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
18350 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
18351 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
18352 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
18353 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
18354 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
18355 program.</p>
18356
18357 <!-- 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 -->
18358
18359 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
18360 <p>
18361 <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>
18362 <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>
18363 <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>
18364 <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>
18365 <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>
18366 <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>
18367 <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>
18368 <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>
18369 <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>
18370 <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>
18371 <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>
18372 <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>
18373 <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>
18374 <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>
18375 </p>
18376
18377 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
18378 <p>
18379 <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>
18380 <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>
18381 <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>
18382 <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>
18383 <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>
18384 <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>
18385 </p>
18386
18387 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
18388 <p>
18389 <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>
18390 </p>
18391
18392 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
18393 <p>
18394 <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>
18395 <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>
18396 <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>
18397 <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>
18398 <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>
18399 <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>
18400 <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>
18401 <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>
18402 <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>
18403 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
18404 <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>
18405 </p>
18406
18407 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
18408 <p>
18409 <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>
18410 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
18411 </p>
18412
18413 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
18414 <p>
18415 <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>
18416 <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>
18417 <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>
18418 </p>
18419
18420 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
18421 <p>
18422 <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>
18423 <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>
18424 <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>
18425 <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>
18426 <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>
18427 </p>
18428
18429 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
18430 <p>
18431 <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>
18432 <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>
18433 <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>
18434 <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>
18435 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
18436 <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>
18437 <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>
18438 <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>
18439 <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>
18440 <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>
18441 <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>
18442 <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>
18443 <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>
18444 <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>
18445 <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>
18446 <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>
18447 <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>
18448 </p>
18449
18450 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
18451 <p>
18452 <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>
18453 <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>
18454 </p>
18455
18456 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
18457 <p>
18458 <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>
18459 <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>
18460 <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>
18461 <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>
18462 <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>
18463 <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>
18464 <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>
18465 <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>
18466 <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>
18467 <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>
18468 </p>
18469
18470 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
18471 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
18472 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
18473 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
18474 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
18475 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
18476 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
18477
18478       </div>
18479       <div class="tags">
18480
18481
18482         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18483
18484
18485       </div>
18486     </div>
18487     <div class="padding"></div>
18488
18489     <div class="entry">
18490       <div class="title">
18491         <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>
18492       </div>
18493       <div class="date">
18494         27th May 2013
18495       </div>
18496       <div class="body">
18497         <p>Two days ago, I asked
18498 <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
18499 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
18500 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
18501 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
18502 and Windows 8.</p>
18503
18504 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
18505 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
18506 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
18507 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
18508 enough to tell.</p>
18509
18510 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
18511 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
18512 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
18513 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
18514 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
18515 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
18516 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
18517 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
18518 to follow.</p>
18519
18520 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
18521 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
18522 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
18523 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
18524 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
18525 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
18526 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
18527 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
18528
18529 <p>I've updated the
18530 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
18531 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
18532 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
18533 machine.</p>
18534
18535 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
18536 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
18537
18538       </div>
18539       <div class="tags">
18540
18541
18542         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18543
18544
18545       </div>
18546     </div>
18547     <div class="padding"></div>
18548
18549     <div class="entry">
18550       <div class="title">
18551         <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>
18552       </div>
18553       <div class="date">
18554         25th May 2013
18555       </div>
18556       <div class="body">
18557         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
18558 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
18559 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
18560 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
18561 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
18562 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
18563
18564 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
18565 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
18566 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
18567 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
18568 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
18569 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
18570 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
18571 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
18572 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
18573 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
18574
18575 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
18576 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
18577 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
18578 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
18579 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
18580 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
18581
18582 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
18583 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
18584 on new Laptops?</p>
18585
18586       </div>
18587       <div class="tags">
18588
18589
18590         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18591
18592
18593       </div>
18594     </div>
18595     <div class="padding"></div>
18596
18597     <div class="entry">
18598       <div class="title">
18599         <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>
18600       </div>
18601       <div class="date">
18602         17th May 2013
18603       </div>
18604       <div class="body">
18605         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
18606 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
18607 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
18608 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
18609 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
18610 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
18611 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
18612 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
18613 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
18614 donate some money</a>.
18615
18616 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
18617 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
18618 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
18619 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
18620 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
18621
18622 <p>The script,
18623 <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/>
18624 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
18625 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
18626 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
18627
18628 <ol>
18629
18630 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
18631 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
18632 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
18633     our configuration.</li>
18634 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
18635     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
18636     according to the profile specified in the config above,
18637     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
18638 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
18639     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
18640 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
18641
18642 </ol>
18643
18644 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
18645 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
18646 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
18647 the needed packages.</p>
18648
18649 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
18650 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
18651 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
18652 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
18653 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
18654 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
18655
18656 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
18657 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
18658 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
18659
18660 <p><pre>
18661 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
18662 DESKTOP="lxde"
18663 </pre></p>
18664
18665 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
18666 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
18667 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
18668 boot.</p>
18669
18670       </div>
18671       <div class="tags">
18672
18673
18674         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>.
18675
18676
18677       </div>
18678     </div>
18679     <div class="padding"></div>
18680
18681     <div class="entry">
18682       <div class="title">
18683         <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>
18684       </div>
18685       <div class="date">
18686         14th May 2013
18687       </div>
18688       <div class="body">
18689         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
18690 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
18691 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
18692
18693 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
18694 2013-05-14</strong></p>
18695
18696 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
18697 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
18698 codename "Wheezy".</p>
18699
18700 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
18701
18702 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
18703 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
18704 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
18705 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
18706 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
18707 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
18708 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
18709 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
18710
18711 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
18712 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
18713 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
18714
18715 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
18716 <ul>
18717   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
18718     default.</li>
18719   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
18720   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
18721   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
18722     ibus-anthy.</li>
18723 </ul>
18724
18725 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
18726 <ul>
18727
18728   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
18729     reliability improvements.</li>
18730   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
18731     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
18732   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
18733     problems.</li>
18734   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
18735     direct:// URL.</li>
18736   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
18737   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
18738   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
18739   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
18740     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
18741   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
18742     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
18743 </ul>
18744
18745 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
18746 <ul>
18747
18748   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
18749     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
18750     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
18751   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
18752   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
18753     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
18754   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
18755   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
18756   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
18757     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
18758   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
18759     password submission problem
18760     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
18761
18762 </ul>
18763
18764 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
18765
18766 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
18767 <ul>
18768
18769   <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>
18770   <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>
18771   <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>
18772
18773 </ul>
18774
18775 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
18776
18777 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
18778
18779 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
18780
18781 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
18782
18783       </div>
18784       <div class="tags">
18785
18786
18787         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18788
18789
18790       </div>
18791     </div>
18792     <div class="padding"></div>
18793
18794     <div class="entry">
18795       <div class="title">
18796         <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>
18797       </div>
18798       <div class="date">
18799         11th May 2013
18800       </div>
18801       <div class="body">
18802         <P>In January,
18803 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
18804 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
18805 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
18806 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
18807 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
18808 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
18809 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
18810 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
18811 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
18812 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
18813 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
18814 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
18815
18816 <p><table>
18817 <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>
18818 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
18819 <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>
18820 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
18821 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
18822 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
18823 <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>
18824 <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>
18825 <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>
18826 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
18827 </table></p>
18828
18829 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
18830 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
18831 available in experimental.</p>
18832
18833 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
18834 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
18835 for LEGO designers.</p>
18836
18837       </div>
18838       <div class="tags">
18839
18840
18841         Tags: <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>.
18842
18843
18844       </div>
18845     </div>
18846     <div class="padding"></div>
18847
18848     <div class="entry">
18849       <div class="title">
18850         <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>
18851       </div>
18852       <div class="date">
18853          5th May 2013
18854       </div>
18855       <div class="body">
18856         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
18857 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
18858 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
18859 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
18860 soon.</p>
18861
18862 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
18863 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
18864 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
18865 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
18866 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
18867 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
18868 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
18869 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
18870 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
18871 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
18872 Edu.</a>
18873
18874 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
18875 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
18876 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
18877 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
18878 follow.<p>
18879
18880       </div>
18881       <div class="tags">
18882
18883
18884         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>.
18885
18886
18887       </div>
18888     </div>
18889     <div class="padding"></div>
18890
18891     <div class="entry">
18892       <div class="title">
18893         <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>
18894       </div>
18895       <div class="date">
18896         26th April 2013
18897       </div>
18898       <div class="body">
18899         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
18900 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
18901 announcement:</p>
18902
18903 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
18904 2013-04-26</strong></p>
18905
18906 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
18907 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
18908
18909 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
18910
18911 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
18912 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
18913 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
18914 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
18915 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
18916 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
18917 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
18918 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
18919 installed via the network.</p>
18920
18921 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
18922 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
18923 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
18924
18925 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
18926
18927 <ul>
18928 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
18929   <ul>
18930      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
18931      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
18932          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
18933          manual.)</li>
18934      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
18935      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
18936      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
18937      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
18938      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
18939      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
18940      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
18941      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
18942      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
18943      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
18944      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
18945      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
18946          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
18947          manual</a> for more details.</li>
18948      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
18949          installation.</li>
18950      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
18951          <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>
18952   </ul></li>
18953 </ul>
18954
18955 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
18956 <ul>
18957 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
18958     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
18959     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
18960 </ul>
18961
18962 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
18963 <ul>
18964 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
18965     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
18966     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
18967 </ul>
18968
18969 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
18970 <ul>
18971 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
18972     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
18973     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
18974 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
18975     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
18976     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
18977 </ul>
18978
18979 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
18980 <ul>
18981 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
18982     yet.</li>
18983 </ul>
18984
18985 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
18986
18987 <ul>
18988 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
18989     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
18990     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
18991 </ul>
18992
18993 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
18994
18995 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
18996 <ul>
18997 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
18998 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
18999 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
19000 </ul>
19001
19002 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
19003
19004 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
19005
19006 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
19007
19008 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
19009
19010       </div>
19011       <div class="tags">
19012
19013
19014         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19015
19016
19017       </div>
19018     </div>
19019     <div class="padding"></div>
19020
19021     <div class="entry">
19022       <div class="title">
19023         <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>
19024       </div>
19025       <div class="date">
19026         16th April 2013
19027       </div>
19028       <div class="body">
19029         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
19030 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
19031 Details about the gathering can be found
19032 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
19033 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
19034 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
19035 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
19036 weekend.</p>
19037
19038 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
19039 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
19040 Edu release.</p>
19041
19042 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
19043
19044       </div>
19045       <div class="tags">
19046
19047
19048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19049
19050
19051       </div>
19052     </div>
19053     <div class="padding"></div>
19054
19055     <div class="entry">
19056       <div class="title">
19057         <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>
19058       </div>
19059       <div class="date">
19060          3rd April 2013
19061       </div>
19062       <div class="body">
19063         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
19064 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
19065 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
19066 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
19067
19068 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
19069 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
19070 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
19071 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
19072 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
19073 BTS. :)</p>
19074
19075       </div>
19076       <div class="tags">
19077
19078
19079         Tags: <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>.
19080
19081
19082       </div>
19083     </div>
19084     <div class="padding"></div>
19085
19086     <div class="entry">
19087       <div class="title">
19088         <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>
19089       </div>
19090       <div class="date">
19091         26th March 2013
19092       </div>
19093       <div class="body">
19094         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
19095 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
19096 font you use when printing.</p>
19097
19098 <p>Three years ago,
19099 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
19100 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
19101 changed their default front from
19102 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
19103 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
19104 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
19105 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
19106 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
19107 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
19108 prints.</p>
19109
19110 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
19111 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
19112 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
19113 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
19114 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
19115 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
19116 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
19117 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
19118 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
19119 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
19120 depend on the documents printed.</p>
19121
19122 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
19123 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
19124 and save some money in the process.</p>
19125
19126 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
19127 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
19128 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
19129 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
19130 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
19131 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
19132 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
19133 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
19134 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
19135
19136       </div>
19137       <div class="tags">
19138
19139
19140         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19141
19142
19143       </div>
19144     </div>
19145     <div class="padding"></div>
19146
19147     <div class="entry">
19148       <div class="title">
19149         <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>
19150       </div>
19151       <div class="date">
19152         24th March 2013
19153       </div>
19154       <div class="body">
19155         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
19156 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
19157 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
19158 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
19159 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
19160 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
19161 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
19162 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
19163 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
19164 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
19165 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
19166 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
19167
19168 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
19169 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
19170 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
19171 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
19172 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
19173 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
19174 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
19175 all I had to do was to use the
19176 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
19177 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
19178 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
19179 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
19180 xsltproc/fop (aka
19181 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
19182 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
19183 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
19184 technical detail.</p>
19185
19186 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
19187 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
19188 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
19189 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
19190 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
19191 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
19192
19193 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
19194 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
19195 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
19196 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
19197 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
19198 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
19199 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
19200 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
19201 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
19202
19203 <p><blockquote><pre>
19204 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
19205 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
19206   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
19207     &lt;hr/&gt;
19208   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
19209 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
19210 </pre></blockquote></p>
19211
19212 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
19213
19214 <p><blockquote><pre>
19215 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
19216 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
19217   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
19218     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
19219       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
19220     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
19221   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
19222 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
19223 </pre></blockquote></p>
19224
19225 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
19226 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
19227 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
19228 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
19229 enough.</p>
19230
19231 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
19232 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
19233 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
19234 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
19235 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
19236 look like this:</p>
19237
19238 <p><blockquote><pre>
19239 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
19240 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
19241   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
19242     &lt;br/&gt;
19243   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
19244 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
19245 </pre></blockquote></p>
19246
19247 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
19248
19249 <p><blockquote><pre>
19250 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
19251 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
19252   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
19253   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
19254     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
19255   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
19256 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
19257 </pre></blockquote></p>
19258
19259 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
19260 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
19261 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
19262 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
19263 page.</p>
19264
19265 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
19266 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
19267 github</a>
19268 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
19269 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
19270 days.</p>
19271
19272       </div>
19273       <div class="tags">
19274
19275
19276         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>.
19277
19278
19279       </div>
19280     </div>
19281     <div class="padding"></div>
19282
19283     <div class="entry">
19284       <div class="title">
19285         <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>
19286       </div>
19287       <div class="date">
19288         17th March 2013
19289       </div>
19290       <div class="body">
19291         <p>Via
19292 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
19293 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
19294 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
19295 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
19296 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
19297 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
19298 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
19299
19300 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
19301 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
19302
19303 <blockquote>
19304 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
19305 </blockquote>
19306
19307 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
19308
19309 <blockquote>
19310 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
19311 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
19312 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
19313 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
19314 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
19315 </blockquote>
19316
19317 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
19318 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
19319 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
19320 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
19321
19322 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
19323 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
19324
19325 <blockquote>
19326 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
19327 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
19328 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
19329 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
19330 </blockquote>
19331
19332 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
19333 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
19334 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
19335 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
19336 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
19337
19338 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
19339 embedding:</p>
19340
19341 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
19342
19343       </div>
19344       <div class="tags">
19345
19346
19347         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19348
19349
19350       </div>
19351     </div>
19352     <div class="padding"></div>
19353
19354     <div class="entry">
19355       <div class="title">
19356         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
19357       </div>
19358       <div class="date">
19359          8th March 2013
19360       </div>
19361       <div class="body">
19362         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
19363 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
19364 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
19365 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
19366 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
19367 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
19368 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
19369
19370 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
19371
19372 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
19373 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
19374
19375 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
19376 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
19377 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
19378 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
19379 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
19380 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
19381
19382 <p>Images are available for download at
19383 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
19384
19385 <p>md5sums:
19386 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
19387 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
19388 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
19389
19390 <p>sha1sums:
19391 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
19392 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
19393 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
19394
19395 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
19396
19397 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
19398 2013-03-03:</p>
19399
19400 <ul>
19401   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
19402   <ul>
19403         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
19404         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
19405   </ul></li>
19406   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
19407   <ul>
19408         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
19409         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
19410   </ul></li>
19411   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
19412      <ul>
19413         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
19414         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
19415         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
19416                 Closes: #664596</li>
19417         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
19418                 Closes: #664976</li>
19419         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
19420            <ul>
19421                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
19422                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
19423            </ul></li>
19424         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
19425            <ul>
19426                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
19427                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
19428                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
19429                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
19430                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
19431            </ul></li>
19432         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
19433     </ul>
19434   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
19435     <ul>
19436         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
19437     </ul></li>
19438 </ul>
19439
19440 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
19441 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
19442 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
19443 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
19444
19445 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
19446 mailinglist
19447 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
19448 </p></blockquote>
19449
19450 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
19451
19452       </div>
19453       <div class="tags">
19454
19455
19456         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19457
19458
19459       </div>
19460     </div>
19461     <div class="padding"></div>
19462
19463     <div class="entry">
19464       <div class="title">
19465         <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>
19466       </div>
19467       <div class="date">
19468          3rd March 2013
19469       </div>
19470       <div class="body">
19471         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
19472 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
19473 support using
19474 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
19475 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
19476 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
19477 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
19478 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
19479 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
19480 using the GNU LGPL, and
19481 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
19482
19483 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
19484 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
19485 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
19486 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
19487 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
19488 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
19489
19490 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
19491 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
19492 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
19493 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
19494 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
19495 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
19496 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
19497 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
19498 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
19499 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
19500 signal distribution is handled using
19501 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
19502 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
19503 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
19504 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
19505 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
19506 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
19507 them up a bit more first.</p>
19508
19509 <p>The development is coordinated on the
19510 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
19511 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
19512 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
19513 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
19514 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
19515 development.</p>
19516
19517       </div>
19518       <div class="tags">
19519
19520
19521         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>.
19522
19523
19524       </div>
19525     </div>
19526     <div class="padding"></div>
19527
19528     <div class="entry">
19529       <div class="title">
19530         <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>
19531       </div>
19532       <div class="date">
19533         27th February 2013
19534       </div>
19535       <div class="body">
19536         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
19537 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
19538 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
19539 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
19540 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
19541 (where I am the chair of the board) and
19542 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
19543 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
19544 GNU», with this description:
19545
19546 <p><blockquote>
19547 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
19548 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
19549 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
19550 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
19551 </blockquote></p>
19552
19553 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
19554 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
19555 am really curious how many will show up.  See
19556 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
19557 page</a> for the location details.</p>
19558
19559       </div>
19560       <div class="tags">
19561
19562
19563         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>.
19564
19565
19566       </div>
19567     </div>
19568     <div class="padding"></div>
19569
19570     <div class="entry">
19571       <div class="title">
19572         <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>
19573       </div>
19574       <div class="date">
19575         15th February 2013
19576       </div>
19577       <div class="body">
19578         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
19579 now a great source of free maps available from
19580 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
19581 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
19582 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
19583 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
19584 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
19585 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
19586 page for descriptions).</p>
19587
19588 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
19589 map you can just edit the
19590 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
19591 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
19592
19593       </div>
19594       <div class="tags">
19595
19596
19597         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>.
19598
19599
19600       </div>
19601     </div>
19602     <div class="padding"></div>
19603
19604     <div class="entry">
19605       <div class="title">
19606         <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>
19607       </div>
19608       <div class="date">
19609         12th February 2013
19610       </div>
19611       <div class="body">
19612         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
19613 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
19614 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
19615 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
19616 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
19617 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
19618 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
19619 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
19620 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
19621 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
19622 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
19623 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
19624 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
19625 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
19626 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
19627 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
19628
19629 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
19630 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
19631 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
19632 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
19633 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
19634 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
19635 fields:</p>
19636
19637 <p><pre>
19638 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
19639 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
19640 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
19641 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
19642 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
19643 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
19644 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
19645 </pre></p>
19646
19647 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
19648 answer regarding
19649 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
19650 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
19651 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
19652 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
19653
19654 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
19655
19656 <p><pre>
19657 BEGIN:VCARD
19658 VERSION:2.1
19659 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
19660 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
19661 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
19662 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
19663 REV:20130212T095000Z
19664 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
19665 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
19666 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
19667 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
19668 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
19669 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
19670 END:VCARD
19671 </pre></p>
19672
19673 <p>The resulting QR code created using
19674 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
19675 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
19676 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
19677 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
19678 system.</p>
19679
19680 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
19681
19682 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
19683 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
19684 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
19685 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
19686
19687 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
19688 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
19689
19690       </div>
19691       <div class="tags">
19692
19693
19694         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>.
19695
19696
19697       </div>
19698     </div>
19699     <div class="padding"></div>
19700
19701     <div class="entry">
19702       <div class="title">
19703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html">Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</a>
19704       </div>
19705       <div class="date">
19706         10th February 2013
19707       </div>
19708       <div class="body">
19709         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
19710
19711 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
19712 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
19713 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
19714 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
19715 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
19716 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
19717 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
19718 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
19719 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
19720 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
19721 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
19722
19723 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
19724 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
19725 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
19726 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
19727 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
19728 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
19729 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
19730 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
19731 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
19732 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
19733 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
19734 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
19735 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
19736 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
19737 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
19738 ones own
19739 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
19740 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
19741 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
19742 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
19743 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
19744 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
19745 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
19746 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
19747 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
19748 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
19749 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
19750
19751 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
19752 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
19753 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
19754 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
19755 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
19756 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
19757
19758 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
19759 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
19760 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
19761
19762       </div>
19763       <div class="tags">
19764
19765
19766         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19767
19768
19769       </div>
19770     </div>
19771     <div class="padding"></div>
19772
19773     <div class="entry">
19774       <div class="title">
19775         <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>
19776       </div>
19777       <div class="date">
19778          2nd February 2013
19779       </div>
19780       <div class="body">
19781         <p>My
19782 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
19783 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
19784 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
19785 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
19786 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
19787 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
19788 version too.</p>
19789
19790 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
19791 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
19792 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
19793 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
19794 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
19795 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
19796 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
19797 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
19798
19799 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
19800 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
19801 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
19802 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
19803 it. :)</p>
19804
19805 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
19806 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
19807 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
19808
19809       </div>
19810       <div class="tags">
19811
19812
19813         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>.
19814
19815
19816       </div>
19817     </div>
19818     <div class="padding"></div>
19819
19820     <div class="entry">
19821       <div class="title">
19822         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
19823       </div>
19824       <div class="date">
19825         22nd January 2013
19826       </div>
19827       <div class="body">
19828         <p>Yesterday, I
19829 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
19830 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
19831 pluggable hardware devices, which I
19832 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
19833 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
19834 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
19835 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
19836 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
19837 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
19838 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
19839 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
19840 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
19841 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
19842
19843 <pre>
19844 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
19845 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
19846 </pre>
19847
19848 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
19849 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
19850 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
19851 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
19852
19853 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
19854 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
19855 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
19856 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
19857 word.</p>
19858
19859 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
19860 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
19861 process.</p>
19862
19863 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
19864 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
19865
19866       </div>
19867       <div class="tags">
19868
19869
19870         Tags: <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>.
19871
19872
19873       </div>
19874     </div>
19875     <div class="padding"></div>
19876
19877     <div class="entry">
19878       <div class="title">
19879         <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>
19880       </div>
19881       <div class="date">
19882         21st January 2013
19883       </div>
19884       <div class="body">
19885         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
19886 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
19887 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
19888 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
19889 it, fetch the
19890 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
19891 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
19892 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
19893 autostart script.</p>
19894
19895 <p>The design is simple:</p>
19896
19897 <ul>
19898
19899 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
19900 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
19901
19902 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
19903 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
19904 initially did.</li>
19905
19906 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
19907 the APT database, a database
19908 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
19909 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
19910
19911 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
19912 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
19913 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
19914 package or packages.</li>
19915
19916 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
19917 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
19918
19919 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
19920 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
19921
19922 </ul>
19923
19924 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
19925 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
19926 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
19927 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
19928
19929 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
19930 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
19931 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
19932 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
19933 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
19934
19935 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
19936 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
19937 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
19938 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
19939 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
19940 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
19941 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
19942 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
19943
19944 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
19945 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
19946 '<tt>svn checkout
19947 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
19948 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
19949 devscripts package.</p>
19950
19951 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
19952 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
19953 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
19954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
19955 instructions</a> for details.</p>
19956
19957       </div>
19958       <div class="tags">
19959
19960
19961         Tags: <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>.
19962
19963
19964       </div>
19965     </div>
19966     <div class="padding"></div>
19967
19968     <div class="entry">
19969       <div class="title">
19970         <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>
19971       </div>
19972       <div class="date">
19973         19th January 2013
19974       </div>
19975       <div class="body">
19976         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
19977 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
19978 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
19979 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
19980 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
19981 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
19982 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
19983 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
19984 not a durable solution.
19985
19986 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
19987 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
19988
19989 <ul>
19990
19991 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
19992   than A4).</li>
19993 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
19994 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
19995 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
19996 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
19997 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
19998 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
19999 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
20000 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
20001 size).</li>
20002 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
20003   X.org packages.</li>
20004 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
20005   the time).
20006
20007 </ul>
20008
20009 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
20010 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
20011 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
20012 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
20013 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
20014 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
20015 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
20016 still be useful.</p>
20017
20018 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
20019 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
20020 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
20021 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
20022 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
20023 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
20024
20025       </div>
20026       <div class="tags">
20027
20028
20029         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20030
20031
20032       </div>
20033     </div>
20034     <div class="padding"></div>
20035
20036     <div class="entry">
20037       <div class="title">
20038         <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>
20039       </div>
20040       <div class="date">
20041         18th January 2013
20042       </div>
20043       <div class="body">
20044         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
20045 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
20046 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
20047 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
20048 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
20049 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
20050 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
20051
20052 <pre>
20053 #!/usr/bin/python
20054 import sys
20055 import apt
20056 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
20057     cache = apt.Cache()
20058     cache.open(None)
20059     thepkgs = []
20060     for pkg in cache:
20061         version = pkg.candidate
20062         if version is None:
20063             version = pkg.installed
20064         if version is None:
20065             continue
20066         record = version.record
20067         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
20068             continue
20069         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
20070         for t in mime_types:
20071             t = t.rstrip().strip()
20072             if t == mimetype:
20073                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
20074     return thepkgs
20075 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
20076 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
20077     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
20078 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
20079 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
20080     print "  %s" %pkg
20081 </pre>
20082
20083 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
20084
20085 <pre>
20086 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
20087 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
20088   gecko-mediaplayer
20089 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
20090 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
20091   browser-plugin-gnash
20092 %
20093 </pre>
20094
20095 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
20096 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
20097 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
20098 anyone working on adding it?</p>
20099
20100 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
20101 request for icweasel support for this feature is
20102 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
20103 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
20104 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
20105 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
20106
20107       </div>
20108       <div class="tags">
20109
20110
20111         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20112
20113
20114       </div>
20115     </div>
20116     <div class="padding"></div>
20117
20118     <div class="entry">
20119       <div class="title">
20120         <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>
20121       </div>
20122       <div class="date">
20123         16th January 2013
20124       </div>
20125       <div class="body">
20126         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
20127 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
20128 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
20129 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
20130 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
20131 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
20132 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
20133 downloaded by the browser.</p>
20134
20135 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
20136 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
20137 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
20138 can be found on the
20139 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
20140 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
20141 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
20142 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
20143 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
20144
20145 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
20146
20147 <pre>
20148   count MIME type
20149   ----- -----------------------
20150      32 text/plain
20151      30 audio/mpeg
20152      29 image/png
20153      28 image/jpeg
20154      27 application/ogg
20155      26 audio/x-mp3
20156      25 image/tiff
20157      25 image/gif
20158      22 image/bmp
20159      22 audio/x-wav
20160      20 audio/x-flac
20161      19 audio/x-mpegurl
20162      18 video/x-ms-asf
20163      18 audio/x-musepack
20164      18 audio/x-mpeg
20165      18 application/x-ogg
20166      17 video/mpeg
20167      17 audio/x-scpls
20168      17 audio/ogg
20169      16 video/x-ms-wmv
20170 </pre>
20171
20172 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
20173
20174 <pre>
20175   count MIME type
20176   ----- -----------------------
20177      33 text/plain
20178      32 image/png
20179      32 image/jpeg
20180      29 audio/mpeg
20181      27 image/gif
20182      26 image/tiff
20183      26 application/ogg
20184      25 audio/x-mp3
20185      22 image/bmp
20186      21 audio/x-wav
20187      19 audio/x-mpegurl
20188      19 audio/x-mpeg
20189      18 video/mpeg
20190      18 audio/x-scpls
20191      18 audio/x-flac
20192      18 application/x-ogg
20193      17 video/x-ms-asf
20194      17 text/html
20195      17 audio/x-musepack
20196      16 image/x-xbitmap
20197 </pre>
20198
20199 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
20200
20201 <pre>
20202   count MIME type
20203   ----- -----------------------
20204      31 text/plain
20205      31 image/png
20206      31 image/jpeg
20207      29 audio/mpeg
20208      28 application/ogg
20209      27 image/gif
20210      26 image/tiff
20211      26 audio/x-mp3
20212      23 audio/x-wav
20213      22 image/bmp
20214      21 audio/x-flac
20215      20 audio/x-mpegurl
20216      19 audio/x-mpeg
20217      18 video/x-ms-asf
20218      18 video/mpeg
20219      18 audio/x-scpls
20220      18 application/x-ogg
20221      17 audio/x-musepack
20222      16 video/x-ms-wmv
20223      16 video/x-msvideo
20224 </pre>
20225
20226 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
20227 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
20228 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
20229 issues.</p>
20230
20231 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
20232 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
20233
20234       </div>
20235       <div class="tags">
20236
20237
20238         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20239
20240
20241       </div>
20242     </div>
20243     <div class="padding"></div>
20244
20245     <div class="entry">
20246       <div class="title">
20247         <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>
20248       </div>
20249       <div class="date">
20250         15th January 2013
20251       </div>
20252       <div class="body">
20253         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
20254 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
20255 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
20256 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
20257 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
20258 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
20259 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
20260 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
20261 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
20262 packages.</p>
20263
20264 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
20265 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
20266 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
20267 modalias.</p>
20268
20269 <p><blockquote>
20270 Package: package-name
20271 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
20272 </blockquote></p>
20273
20274 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
20275 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
20276
20277 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
20278 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
20279
20280 <p><blockquote>
20281 Package: cheese
20282 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
20283 </blockquote></p>
20284
20285 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
20286 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
20287
20288 <p><blockquote>
20289 Package: pcmciautils
20290 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
20291 </blockquote></p>
20292
20293 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
20294 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
20295
20296 <p><blockquote>
20297 Package: colorhug-client
20298 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
20299 </blockquote></p>
20300
20301 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
20302 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
20303 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
20304
20305 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
20306 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
20307 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
20308 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
20309 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
20310 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
20311 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
20312 Raring.</p>
20313
20314 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
20315 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
20316 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
20317 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
20318 try the
20319 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
20320 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
20321 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
20322 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
20323
20324 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
20325 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
20326
20327 <p><blockquote>
20328 % ./hw-support-lookup
20329 <br>yubikey-personalization
20330 <br>%
20331 </blockquote></p>
20332
20333 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
20334 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
20335
20336 <p><blockquote>
20337 % ./hw-support-lookup
20338 <br>pcmciautils
20339 <br>%
20340 </blockquote></p>
20341
20342 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
20343 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
20344 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
20345
20346 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
20347 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
20348 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
20349 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
20350 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
20351 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
20352 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
20353 see if it work.</p>
20354
20355 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
20356 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
20357 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
20358 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
20359
20360       </div>
20361       <div class="tags">
20362
20363
20364         Tags: <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>.
20365
20366
20367       </div>
20368     </div>
20369     <div class="padding"></div>
20370
20371     <div class="entry">
20372       <div class="title">
20373         <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>
20374       </div>
20375       <div class="date">
20376         14th January 2013
20377       </div>
20378       <div class="body">
20379         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
20380 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
20381 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
20382 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
20383 in
20384 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
20385 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
20386
20387 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
20388
20389 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
20390 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
20391 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
20392 &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;,
20393 &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
20394 &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;.
20395
20396 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
20397 this shell script:</p>
20398
20399 <pre>
20400 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
20401 </pre>
20402
20403 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
20404 using modinfo:</p>
20405
20406 <pre>
20407 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
20408 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
20409 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
20410 %
20411 </pre>
20412
20413 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
20414
20415 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
20416 Bridge memory controller:</p>
20417
20418 <p><blockquote>
20419 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
20420 </blockquote></p>
20421
20422 <p>This represent these values:</p>
20423
20424 <pre>
20425  v   00008086  (vendor)
20426  d   00002770  (device)
20427  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
20428  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
20429  bc  06        (bus class)
20430  sc  00        (bus subclass)
20431  i   00        (interface)
20432 </pre>
20433
20434 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
20435 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
20436 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
20437 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
20438
20439 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
20440 means.</p>
20441
20442 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
20443
20444 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
20445 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
20446
20447 <p><blockquote>
20448 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
20449 </blockquote></p>
20450
20451 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
20452
20453 <pre>
20454  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
20455  p    0001  (device product)
20456  d    0206  (bcddevice)
20457  dc     09  (device class)
20458  dsc    00  (device subclass)
20459  dp     00  (device protocol)
20460  ic     09  (interface class)
20461  isc    00  (interface subclass)
20462  ip     00  (interface protocol)
20463 </pre>
20464
20465 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
20466 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
20467 these alias entries show up:</p>
20468
20469 <p><blockquote>
20470 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
20471 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
20472 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
20473 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
20474 </blockquote></p>
20475
20476 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
20477 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
20478 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
20479
20480 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
20481
20482 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
20483 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
20484
20485 <p><blockquote>
20486 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
20487 </blockquote></p>
20488
20489 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
20490
20491 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
20492
20493 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
20494 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
20495 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
20496
20497 <p><blockquote>
20498 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
20499 </blockquote></p>
20500
20501 <p>The values present are</p>
20502
20503 <pre>
20504  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
20505  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
20506  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
20507  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
20508  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
20509  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
20510  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
20511  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
20512  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
20513  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
20514  ct   10             (chassis type)
20515  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
20516 </pre>
20517
20518 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
20519 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
20520
20521 <pre>
20522   3 Desktop
20523   4 Low Profile Desktop
20524   5 Pizza Box
20525   6 Mini Tower
20526   7 Tower
20527   8 Portable
20528   9 Laptop
20529  10 Notebook
20530  11 Hand Held
20531  12 Docking Station
20532  13 All In One
20533  14 Sub Notebook
20534  15 Space-saving
20535  16 Lunch Box
20536  17 Main Server Chassis
20537  18 Expansion Chassis
20538  19 Sub Chassis
20539  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
20540  21 Peripheral Chassis
20541  22 RAID Chassis
20542  23 Rack Mount Chassis
20543  24 Sealed-case PC
20544  25 Multi-system
20545  26 CompactPCI
20546  27 AdvancedTCA
20547  28 Blade
20548  29 Blade Enclosing
20549 </pre>
20550
20551 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
20552 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
20553 claim it is a desktop.</p>
20554
20555 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
20556
20557 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
20558 test machine:</p>
20559
20560 <p><blockquote>
20561 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
20562 </blockquote></p>
20563
20564 <p>The values present are</p>
20565
20566 <pre>
20567   ty  01  (type)
20568   pr  00  (prototype)
20569   id  00  (id)
20570   ex  00  (extra)
20571 </pre>
20572
20573 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
20574 the valid values are.</p>
20575
20576 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
20577
20578 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
20579 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
20580 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
20581 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
20582 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
20583 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
20584 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
20585
20586 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
20587
20588 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
20589 one can use the following shell script:</p>
20590
20591 <pre>
20592   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
20593     echo "$id" ; \
20594     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
20595   done
20596 </pre>
20597
20598 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
20599 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
20600
20601 <pre>
20602   acpi:ACPI0003:
20603     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
20604   acpi:device:
20605   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
20606   acpi:IBM0068:
20607     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
20608     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
20609     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
20610     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
20611   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
20612     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
20613     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
20614     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
20615   [...]
20616 </pre>
20617
20618 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
20619 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
20620 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
20621 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
20622
20623 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
20624 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
20625 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
20626
20627       </div>
20628       <div class="tags">
20629
20630
20631         Tags: <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>.
20632
20633
20634       </div>
20635     </div>
20636     <div class="padding"></div>
20637
20638     <div class="entry">
20639       <div class="title">
20640         <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>
20641       </div>
20642       <div class="date">
20643         10th January 2013
20644       </div>
20645       <div class="body">
20646         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
20647 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
20648 Launcher and updated the Debian package
20649 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
20650 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
20651 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
20652 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
20653 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
20654 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
20655 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
20656 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
20657 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
20658 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
20659 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
20660 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
20661 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
20662 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
20663 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
20664
20665       </div>
20666       <div class="tags">
20667
20668
20669         Tags: <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>.
20670
20671
20672       </div>
20673     </div>
20674     <div class="padding"></div>
20675
20676     <div class="entry">
20677       <div class="title">
20678         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
20679       </div>
20680       <div class="date">
20681          9th January 2013
20682       </div>
20683       <div class="body">
20684         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
20685 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
20686 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
20687 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
20688 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
20689 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
20690 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
20691 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
20692 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
20693 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
20694 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
20695
20696 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
20697 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
20698 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
20699 simple:
20700
20701 <ul>
20702
20703 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
20704   starting when a user log in.</li>
20705
20706 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
20707   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
20708
20709 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
20710   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
20711   packages.</li>
20712
20713 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
20714   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
20715
20716 </ul>
20717
20718 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
20719 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
20720 discover database to find packages and
20721 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
20722 packages.</p>
20723
20724 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
20725 draft package is now checked into
20726 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
20727 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
20728 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
20729 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
20730 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
20731 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
20732 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
20733 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
20734 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
20735 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
20736 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
20737 because of the freeze).</p>
20738
20739 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
20740 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
20741 inserted):</p>
20742
20743 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
20744
20745 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
20746 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
20747 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
20748
20749 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
20750 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
20751 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
20752 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
20753 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
20754 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
20755 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
20756
20757 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
20758 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
20759 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
20760 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
20761 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
20762 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
20763 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
20764 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
20765 not be installed?</p>
20766
20767 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
20768 please send me an email. :)</p>
20769
20770       </div>
20771       <div class="tags">
20772
20773
20774         Tags: <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>.
20775
20776
20777       </div>
20778     </div>
20779     <div class="padding"></div>
20780
20781     <div class="entry">
20782       <div class="title">
20783         <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>
20784       </div>
20785       <div class="date">
20786          2nd January 2013
20787       </div>
20788       <div class="body">
20789         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
20790 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
20791 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
20792 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
20793 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
20794 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
20795 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
20796 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
20797 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
20798 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
20799
20800 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
20801 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
20802 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
20803
20804       </div>
20805       <div class="tags">
20806
20807
20808         Tags: <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>.
20809
20810
20811       </div>
20812     </div>
20813     <div class="padding"></div>
20814
20815     <div class="entry">
20816       <div class="title">
20817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
20818       </div>
20819       <div class="date">
20820         28th December 2012
20821       </div>
20822       <div class="body">
20823         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
20824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
20825 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
20826 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
20827 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
20828 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
20829 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
20830 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
20831 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
20832 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
20833 followed by many others. :)</p>
20834
20835 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
20836 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
20837 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
20838 you want to donate to the project.</p>
20839
20840       </div>
20841       <div class="tags">
20842
20843
20844         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20845
20846
20847       </div>
20848     </div>
20849     <div class="padding"></div>
20850
20851     <div class="entry">
20852       <div class="title">
20853         <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>
20854       </div>
20855       <div class="date">
20856         25th December 2012
20857       </div>
20858       <div class="body">
20859         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
20860 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
20861
20862 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
20863 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
20864 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
20865 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
20866 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
20867 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
20868 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
20869 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
20870 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
20871 name.</p>
20872
20873 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
20874 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
20875 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
20876
20877 <blockquote><pre>
20878 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
20879 cd bitcoin
20880 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
20881 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
20882 </pre></blockquote>
20883
20884 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
20885 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
20886 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
20887 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
20888 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
20889 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
20890 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
20891 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
20892 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
20893
20894 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
20895 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
20896 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
20897
20898       </div>
20899       <div class="tags">
20900
20901
20902         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>.
20903
20904
20905       </div>
20906     </div>
20907     <div class="padding"></div>
20908
20909     <div class="entry">
20910       <div class="title">
20911         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
20912       </div>
20913       <div class="date">
20914         21st December 2012
20915       </div>
20916       <div class="body">
20917         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
20918 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
20919 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
20920 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
20921 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
20922 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
20923 is now maintained by a
20924 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
20925 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
20926 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
20927 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
20928 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
20929 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
20930 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
20931 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
20932 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
20933 Corallo in a
20934 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
20935 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
20936 Debian package.</p>
20937
20938 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
20939 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
20940 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
20941 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
20942 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
20943 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
20944 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
20945 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
20946 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
20947 new version to unstable.
20948
20949 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
20950 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
20951 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
20952 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
20953 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
20954 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
20955 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
20956 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
20957 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
20958 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
20959 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
20960 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
20961 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
20962 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
20963 have not tested them.</p>
20964
20965 <p>My
20966 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
20967 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
20968 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
20969 years ago, as can be
20970 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
20971 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
20972 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
20973 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
20974 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
20975 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
20976 the same address as last time,
20977 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
20978
20979       </div>
20980       <div class="tags">
20981
20982
20983         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>.
20984
20985
20986       </div>
20987     </div>
20988     <div class="padding"></div>
20989
20990     <div class="entry">
20991       <div class="title">
20992         <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>
20993       </div>
20994       <div class="date">
20995         18th December 2012
20996       </div>
20997       <div class="body">
20998         <p>A few days ago I came across
20999 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
21000 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
21001 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
21002 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
21003 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
21004 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
21005 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
21006 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
21007 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
21008
21009 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
21010 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
21011 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
21012 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
21013
21014 <blockquote><pre>
21015 2004-05-27 Book Store
21016       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
21017       Liabilities:Visa
21018 </pre></blockquote>
21019
21020 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
21021 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
21022 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
21023 Spang</a>,
21024 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
21025 Keen</a>,
21026 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
21027 Cantino</a> and
21028 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
21029 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
21030 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
21031 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
21032 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
21033
21034 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
21035 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
21036 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
21037 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
21038 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
21039
21040 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
21041 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
21042 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
21043 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
21044 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
21045 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
21046 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
21047 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
21048 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
21049
21050       </div>
21051       <div class="tags">
21052
21053
21054         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21055
21056
21057       </div>
21058     </div>
21059     <div class="padding"></div>
21060
21061     <div class="entry">
21062       <div class="title">
21063         <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>
21064       </div>
21065       <div class="date">
21066          6th December 2012
21067       </div>
21068       <div class="body">
21069         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
21070 Oslo</a>, we use the
21071 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
21072 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
21073 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
21074 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
21075 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
21076 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
21077 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
21078 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
21079 Python.</p>
21080
21081 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
21082 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
21083 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
21084 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
21085 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
21086 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
21087
21088 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
21089 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
21090 user currently logged in:</p>
21091
21092 <blockquote><pre>
21093 #!/usr/bin/env python
21094 import getpass
21095 import xmlrpclib
21096 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
21097 username = getpass.getuser()
21098 password = getpass.getpass()
21099 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
21100 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
21101 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
21102 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
21103 result = server.logout(sessionid)
21104 print result
21105 </pre></blockquote>
21106
21107 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
21108 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
21109
21110       </div>
21111       <div class="tags">
21112
21113
21114         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>.
21115
21116
21117       </div>
21118     </div>
21119     <div class="padding"></div>
21120
21121     <div class="entry">
21122       <div class="title">
21123         <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>
21124       </div>
21125       <div class="date">
21126         17th November 2012
21127       </div>
21128       <div class="body">
21129         <p>While working on a
21130 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
21131 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
21132 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
21133 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
21134 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
21135 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
21136
21137 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
21138 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
21139 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
21140 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
21141 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
21142 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
21143 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
21144 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
21145 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
21146 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
21147 arguments.</p>
21148
21149 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
21150 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
21151 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
21152 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
21153 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
21154 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
21155 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
21156 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
21157
21158 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
21159 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
21160 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
21161 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
21162 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
21163 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
21164 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
21165 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
21166 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
21167 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
21168 correct right holder.</p>
21169
21170 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
21171 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
21172 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
21173 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
21174 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
21175 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
21176 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
21177 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
21178 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
21179 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
21180 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
21181 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
21182 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
21183 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
21184
21185 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
21186 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
21187 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.</p>
21188
21189 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
21190 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
21191
21192       </div>
21193       <div class="tags">
21194
21195
21196         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>.
21197
21198
21199       </div>
21200     </div>
21201     <div class="padding"></div>
21202
21203     <div class="entry">
21204       <div class="title">
21205         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
21206       </div>
21207       <div class="date">
21208         14th November 2012
21209       </div>
21210       <div class="body">
21211         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
21212 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
21213 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
21214 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
21215 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
21216 the people behind the German
21217 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
21218 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
21219 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
21220
21221 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21222
21223 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
21224 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
21225 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
21226
21227 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
21228 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
21229 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
21230 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
21231 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
21232 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
21233
21234 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
21235 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
21236 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
21237 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
21238 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
21239 relationship management and the communication processes in the
21240 project.</p>
21241
21242 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
21243 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
21244 and a yoga teacher.</p>
21245
21246 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
21247 project?</strong></p>
21248
21249 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
21250
21251 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
21252 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
21253 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
21254 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
21255 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
21256 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
21257 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
21258 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
21259 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
21260 parents.</p>
21261
21262 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
21263 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
21264 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
21265 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
21266 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
21267 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
21268 Germany.</p>
21269
21270 <p>For information about our school project you can read
21271 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
21272 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
21273
21274 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
21275 Edu?</strong></p>
21276
21277 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
21278 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
21279
21280 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
21281 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
21282 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
21283 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
21284 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
21285 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
21286 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
21287 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
21288 teachers, parents...</p>
21289
21290 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
21291 Edu?</strong></p>
21292
21293 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
21294 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
21295
21296 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
21297 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
21298 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
21299 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
21300 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
21301
21302 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
21303 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
21304 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
21305 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
21306 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
21307 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
21308 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
21309
21310 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21311
21312 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
21313 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
21314 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
21315 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
21316
21317 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21318 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21319
21320 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
21321 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
21322 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
21323 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
21324 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
21325
21326 <ul>
21327
21328 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
21329 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
21330 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
21331
21332 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
21333 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
21334 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
21335 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
21336 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
21337 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
21338 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
21339
21340 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
21341 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
21342 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
21343 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
21344
21345 </ul>
21346
21347       </div>
21348       <div class="tags">
21349
21350
21351         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21352
21353
21354       </div>
21355     </div>
21356     <div class="padding"></div>
21357
21358     <div class="entry">
21359       <div class="title">
21360         <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>
21361       </div>
21362       <div class="date">
21363          4th November 2012
21364       </div>
21365       <div class="body">
21366         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
21367 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
21368 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
21369 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
21370 see how a member of the bitcoin community
21371 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
21372 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
21373 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
21374 competition.  My thoughts go to the
21375 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
21376 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
21377 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
21378 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
21379 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
21380
21381 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
21382 that the community already seem to have
21383 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
21384 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
21385 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
21386 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
21387 wealth is available.</p>
21388
21389       </div>
21390       <div class="tags">
21391
21392
21393         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>.
21394
21395
21396       </div>
21397     </div>
21398     <div class="padding"></div>
21399
21400     <div class="entry">
21401       <div class="title">
21402         <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>
21403       </div>
21404       <div class="date">
21405         26th October 2012
21406       </div>
21407       <div class="body">
21408         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
21409 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
21410 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
21411 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
21412 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
21413 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
21414 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
21415 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
21416 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
21417 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
21418 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
21419 it every time.</p>
21420
21421 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
21422 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
21423 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
21424 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
21425 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
21426 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
21427 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
21428 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
21429 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
21430 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
21431 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
21432 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
21433
21434 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
21435 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
21436 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
21437 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
21438 article: First the unplanned outage:
21439
21440 <blockquote><pre>
21441 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
21442 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
21443 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
21444 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
21445 Duration:    40 minutes
21446 Scope:       Exchange 2003
21447 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
21448              a cluster failover.
21449
21450 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
21451              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
21452 Technician:  [xxx]
21453 </pre></blockquote>
21454
21455 Next the planned outage:
21456
21457 <blockquote><pre>
21458 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
21459 Severity:    Major (Planned)
21460 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
21461 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
21462 Duration:    10 hours
21463 Scope:       H2 Transport
21464 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
21465              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
21466              4510s.
21467 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
21468              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
21469              connectivity.
21470 Technician:  [xxx]
21471 </pre></blockquote>
21472
21473 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
21474 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
21475 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
21476 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
21477 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
21478 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
21479 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
21480
21481 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
21482 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
21483 university too.  We do register
21484 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
21485 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
21486 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
21487 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
21488 for other sites to consider too?</p>
21489
21490       </div>
21491       <div class="tags">
21492
21493
21494         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>.
21495
21496
21497       </div>
21498     </div>
21499     <div class="padding"></div>
21500
21501     <div class="entry">
21502       <div class="title">
21503         <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>
21504       </div>
21505       <div class="date">
21506         22nd October 2012
21507       </div>
21508       <div class="body">
21509         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
21510 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
21511 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
21512 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
21513 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
21514 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
21515 background information is available in Norwegian from
21516 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
21517 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
21518 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
21519 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
21520 willing to
21521 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
21522 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
21523 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
21524 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
21525 sounded like
21526 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
21527 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
21528 later.</p>
21529
21530 <p>And thought this action is
21531 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
21532 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
21533 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
21534 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
21535 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
21536 rights.</p>
21537
21538 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
21539 unacceptable terms.  For example
21540 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
21541 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
21542 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
21543 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
21544 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
21545
21546 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
21547 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
21548 restored the account of the user, as reported by
21549 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
21550 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
21551 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
21552 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
21553 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
21554 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
21555 reading two opinions from
21556 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
21557 Phipps</a> and
21558 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
21559 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
21560 details about the original story.</p>
21561
21562       </div>
21563       <div class="tags">
21564
21565
21566         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>.
21567
21568
21569       </div>
21570     </div>
21571     <div class="padding"></div>
21572
21573     <div class="entry">
21574       <div class="title">
21575         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
21576       </div>
21577       <div class="date">
21578         18th October 2012
21579       </div>
21580       <div class="body">
21581         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
21582 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
21583 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
21584 across a marvellous drawing by
21585 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
21586 visualising some of what is going on.
21587
21588 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
21589 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
21590
21591 <blockquote>
21592 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
21593 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
21594 </blockquote>
21595
21596 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
21597 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
21598 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
21599 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
21600 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
21601 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
21602
21603       </div>
21604       <div class="tags">
21605
21606
21607         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>.
21608
21609
21610       </div>
21611     </div>
21612     <div class="padding"></div>
21613
21614     <div class="entry">
21615       <div class="title">
21616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
21617       </div>
21618       <div class="date">
21619         12th October 2012
21620       </div>
21621       <div class="body">
21622         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
21623 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
21624 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
21625 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
21626 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
21627 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
21628 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
21629 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
21630 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
21631 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
21632 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
21633 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
21634 matter".</p>
21635
21636 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
21637 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
21638 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
21639 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
21640 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
21641 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
21642 to argue its side.</p>
21643
21644 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
21645 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
21646 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
21647 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
21648
21649 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
21650 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
21651 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
21652
21653       </div>
21654       <div class="tags">
21655
21656
21657         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>.
21658
21659
21660       </div>
21661     </div>
21662     <div class="padding"></div>
21663
21664     <div class="entry">
21665       <div class="title">
21666         <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>
21667       </div>
21668       <div class="date">
21669          3rd October 2012
21670       </div>
21671       <div class="body">
21672         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
21673 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
21674 the computer science book collection available in his local
21675 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
21676 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
21677 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
21678 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
21679 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
21680 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
21681 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
21682 recently published books.</p>
21683
21684 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
21685 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
21686 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
21687 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
21688 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
21689 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
21690 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
21691 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
21692 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
21693 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
21694 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
21695 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
21696 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
21697 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
21698 for the library that evening.</p>
21699
21700 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
21701 going to know that for example
21702 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
21703 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
21704 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
21705 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
21706 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
21707 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
21708 book right away.</p>
21709
21710       </div>
21711       <div class="tags">
21712
21713
21714         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21715
21716
21717       </div>
21718     </div>
21719     <div class="padding"></div>
21720
21721     <div class="entry">
21722       <div class="title">
21723         <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>
21724       </div>
21725       <div class="date">
21726         23rd September 2012
21727       </div>
21728       <div class="body">
21729         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
21730 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
21731 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
21732 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
21733 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
21734 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
21735
21736 When I started, I
21737 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
21738 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
21739 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
21740 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
21741 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
21742 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
21743 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
21744
21745 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
21746
21747 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
21748 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
21749 the project files currently available from
21750 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
21751
21752 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
21753 the updated
21754 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
21755 and
21756 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
21757 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
21758 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
21759 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
21760
21761       </div>
21762       <div class="tags">
21763
21764
21765         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>.
21766
21767
21768       </div>
21769     </div>
21770     <div class="padding"></div>
21771
21772     <div class="entry">
21773       <div class="title">
21774         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
21775       </div>
21776       <div class="date">
21777         17th September 2012
21778       </div>
21779       <div class="body">
21780         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
21781 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
21782 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
21783 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
21784 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
21785 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
21786 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
21787
21788 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21789
21790 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
21791 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
21792 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
21793 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
21794 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
21795 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
21796 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
21797 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
21798 training is anyway very important</p>
21799
21800 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
21801 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
21802 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
21803 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
21804 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
21805
21806 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21807 project?</strong></p>
21808
21809 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
21810 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
21811 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
21812 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
21813 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
21814 hole.</p>
21815
21816 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21817 Edu?</strong></p>
21818
21819 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
21820 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
21821 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
21822 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
21823 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
21824 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
21825 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
21826 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
21827 hassle.</p>
21828
21829 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21830 Edu?</strong></p>
21831
21832 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
21833 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
21834 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
21835 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
21836 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
21837 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
21838 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
21839 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
21840
21841 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21842
21843 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
21844 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
21845 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
21846 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
21847 has the same...</p>
21848
21849 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
21850 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
21851 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
21852 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
21853
21854 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21855 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21856
21857 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
21858 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
21859 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
21860
21861 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
21862 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
21863 don't.</p>
21864
21865 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
21866 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
21867 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
21868 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
21869 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
21870 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
21871 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
21872
21873       </div>
21874       <div class="tags">
21875
21876
21877         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21878
21879
21880       </div>
21881     </div>
21882     <div class="padding"></div>
21883
21884     <div class="entry">
21885       <div class="title">
21886         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
21887       </div>
21888       <div class="date">
21889         15th September 2012
21890       </div>
21891       <div class="body">
21892         <p>After the
21893 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
21894 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
21895 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
21896 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
21897 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
21898 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
21899 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
21900 was
21901 <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
21902 formal working group should be formed.</p>
21903
21904 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
21905 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
21906 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
21907 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
21908 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
21909 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
21910 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
21911 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
21912
21913 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
21914 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
21915 IETF.</p>
21916
21917       </div>
21918       <div class="tags">
21919
21920
21921         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>.
21922
21923
21924       </div>
21925     </div>
21926     <div class="padding"></div>
21927
21928     <div class="entry">
21929       <div class="title">
21930         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
21931       </div>
21932       <div class="date">
21933         12th September 2012
21934       </div>
21935       <div class="body">
21936         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
21937 publication of of
21938 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
21939 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
21940 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
21941 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
21942 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
21943 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
21944 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
21945 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
21946 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
21947 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
21948
21949 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
21950 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
21951 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
21952 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
21953
21954 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
21955 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
21956
21957       </div>
21958       <div class="tags">
21959
21960
21961         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>.
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/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
21971       </div>
21972       <div class="date">
21973          7th September 2012
21974       </div>
21975       <div class="body">
21976         <p>As I
21977 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
21978 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
21979 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
21980 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
21981 repository for the project</a>.</p>
21982
21983 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
21984 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
21985 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
21986 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
21987
21988 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
21989 PostScript formats at
21990 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
21991 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
21992
21993       </div>
21994       <div class="tags">
21995
21996
21997         Tags: <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>.
21998
21999
22000       </div>
22001     </div>
22002     <div class="padding"></div>
22003
22004     <div class="entry">
22005       <div class="title">
22006         <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>
22007       </div>
22008       <div class="date">
22009         23rd August 2012
22010       </div>
22011       <div class="body">
22012         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
22013 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
22014 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
22015 revisit the great site
22016 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
22017 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
22018 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
22019
22020       </div>
22021       <div class="tags">
22022
22023
22024         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>.
22025
22026
22027       </div>
22028     </div>
22029     <div class="padding"></div>
22030
22031     <div class="entry">
22032       <div class="title">
22033         <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>
22034       </div>
22035       <div class="date">
22036         17th August 2012
22037       </div>
22038       <div class="body">
22039         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
22040 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
22041 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
22042 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
22043 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
22044 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
22045 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
22046 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
22047 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
22048 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
22049 summer I
22050 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
22051 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
22052 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
22053
22054 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
22055 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
22056 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
22057 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
22058 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
22059 progress:</p>
22060
22061 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
22062
22063 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
22064 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
22065 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
22066 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
22067 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
22068 english version of the docbook source.</p>
22069
22070 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
22071 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
22072 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
22073 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
22074 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
22075 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
22076 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
22077 project files currently available from <a
22078 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
22079
22080 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
22081 the updated
22082 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
22083 and
22084 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
22085 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
22086 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
22087 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
22088
22089       </div>
22090       <div class="tags">
22091
22092
22093         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>.
22094
22095
22096       </div>
22097     </div>
22098     <div class="padding"></div>
22099
22100     <div class="entry">
22101       <div class="title">
22102         <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>
22103       </div>
22104       <div class="date">
22105         10th August 2012
22106       </div>
22107       <div class="body">
22108         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
22109 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
22110 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
22111 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
22112 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
22113 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
22114 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
22115 case for the language
22116 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
22117 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
22118
22119 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
22120 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
22121 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
22122 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
22123 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
22124
22125 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
22126 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
22127 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
22128 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
22129 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
22130 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
22131 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
22132 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
22133 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
22134 alias for 'nb'.</p>
22135
22136 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
22137 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
22138 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
22139 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
22140 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
22141 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
22142 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
22143 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
22144 at the same time. :(</p>
22145
22146 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
22147 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
22148 processors. :(</p>
22149
22150 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
22151
22152       </div>
22153       <div class="tags">
22154
22155
22156         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>.
22157
22158
22159       </div>
22160     </div>
22161     <div class="padding"></div>
22162
22163     <div class="entry">
22164       <div class="title">
22165         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
22166       </div>
22167       <div class="date">
22168         31st July 2012
22169       </div>
22170       <div class="body">
22171         <p>I tried to send this text to the
22172 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
22173 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
22174 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
22175 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
22176 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
22177 out.</p>
22178
22179 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
22180 learning curve at the moment.</p>
22181
22182 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
22183 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
22184 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
22185 available from
22186 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
22187 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
22188 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
22189 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
22190 Squeeze.</p>
22191
22192 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
22193 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
22194 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
22195 problems.</p>
22196
22197 <ul>
22198
22199 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
22200    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
22201    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
22202    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
22203    index references spanning several pages (See
22204    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
22205    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
22206    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
22207
22208 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
22209    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
22210    #683163</a>).</li>
22211
22212 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
22213    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
22214    footnote and text body, see
22215    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
22216    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
22217    refs listed are not right).</li>
22218
22219 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
22220
22221 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
22222    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
22223
22224 </ul>
22225
22226 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
22227 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
22228 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
22229
22230 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
22231
22232       </div>
22233       <div class="tags">
22234
22235
22236         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>.
22237
22238
22239       </div>
22240     </div>
22241     <div class="padding"></div>
22242
22243     <div class="entry">
22244       <div class="title">
22245         <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>
22246       </div>
22247       <div class="date">
22248         21st July 2012
22249       </div>
22250       <div class="body">
22251         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
22252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
22253 norwegian version</a> of the book
22254 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
22255 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
22256 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
22257 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
22258 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
22259
22260 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
22261 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
22262 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
22263 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
22264 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
22265 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
22266 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
22267 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
22268 print. :)</p>
22269
22270 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
22271 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
22272 language.</p>
22273
22274       </div>
22275       <div class="tags">
22276
22277
22278         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>.
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/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>
22288       </div>
22289       <div class="date">
22290         16th July 2012
22291       </div>
22292       <div class="body">
22293         <p>I am currently working on a
22294 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
22295 to translate</a> the book
22296 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
22297 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
22298 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
22299 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
22300 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
22301 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
22302 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
22303
22304 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
22305 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
22306 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
22307 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
22308 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
22309 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
22310 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
22311 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
22312 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
22313
22314       </div>
22315       <div class="tags">
22316
22317
22318         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>.
22319
22320
22321       </div>
22322     </div>
22323     <div class="padding"></div>
22324
22325     <div class="entry">
22326       <div class="title">
22327         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
22328       </div>
22329       <div class="date">
22330          9th July 2012
22331       </div>
22332       <div class="body">
22333         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
22334 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
22335 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
22336 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
22337 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
22338 to adjust and scale the just released
22339 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
22340 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
22341 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
22342
22343 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22344
22345 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
22346 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
22347 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
22348 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
22349 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
22350 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
22351 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
22352 perspective when working with IT.</p>
22353
22354 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22355 project?</strong></p>
22356
22357 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
22358 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
22359 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
22360 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
22361 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
22362 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
22363
22364 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22365 Edu?</strong></p>
22366
22367 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
22368 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
22369 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
22370 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
22371 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
22372 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
22373 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
22374 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
22375 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
22376 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
22377 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
22378 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
22379 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
22380 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
22381 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
22382 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
22383 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
22384 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
22385 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
22386 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
22387 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
22388 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
22389 quicker to update.
22390
22391 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22392 Edu?</strong></p>
22393
22394 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
22395 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
22396 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
22397 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
22398 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
22399 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
22400
22401 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
22402 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
22403 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
22404 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
22405 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
22406 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
22407 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
22408 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
22409 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
22410 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
22411 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
22412 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
22413 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
22414 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
22415 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
22416
22417 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
22418 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
22419 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
22420 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
22421 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
22422 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
22423 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
22424 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
22425
22426 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
22427 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
22428 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
22429 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
22430 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
22431 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
22432 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
22433 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
22434 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
22435 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
22436 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
22437 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
22438 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
22439 sound file.</p>
22440
22441 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
22442 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
22443 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
22444 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
22445 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
22446 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
22447 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
22448 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
22449 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
22450
22451 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22452
22453 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
22454 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
22455 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
22456 )</p>
22457
22458 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22459 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22460
22461 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
22462 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
22463 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
22464 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
22465 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
22466 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
22467 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
22468 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
22469 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
22470 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
22471 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
22472 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
22473 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
22474 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
22475 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
22476
22477 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
22478 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
22479 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
22480 management with Airtime</a>,
22481 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
22482 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
22483 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
22484 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
22485 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
22486
22487       </div>
22488       <div class="tags">
22489
22490
22491         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22492
22493
22494       </div>
22495     </div>
22496     <div class="padding"></div>
22497
22498     <div class="entry">
22499       <div class="title">
22500         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
22501       </div>
22502       <div class="date">
22503          8th July 2012
22504       </div>
22505       <div class="body">
22506         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
22507 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
22508 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
22509 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
22510 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
22511 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
22512 Steinberg in his blog post
22513 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
22514 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
22515 spending of your tax money.</p>
22516
22517 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
22518 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
22519 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
22520 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
22521 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
22522 purchases.</p>
22523
22524       </div>
22525       <div class="tags">
22526
22527
22528         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22529
22530
22531       </div>
22532     </div>
22533     <div class="padding"></div>
22534
22535     <div class="entry">
22536       <div class="title">
22537         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
22538       </div>
22539       <div class="date">
22540          7th July 2012
22541       </div>
22542       <div class="body">
22543         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
22544 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
22545 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
22546 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
22547 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
22548 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
22549 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
22550 receive.  The software is
22551
22552 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
22553 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
22554 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
22555 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
22556 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
22557 Windows</a>.</p>
22558
22559 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
22560 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
22561
22562 <p><ul>
22563
22564   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
22565     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
22566
22567   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
22568     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
22569     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
22570     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
22571     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
22572     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
22573     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
22574     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
22575     </li>
22576
22577   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
22578     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
22579
22580   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
22581     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
22582
22583   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
22584     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
22585
22586   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
22587
22588   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
22589     formats </li>
22590
22591   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
22592     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
22593     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
22594     (as separate sets)</li>
22595
22596   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
22597     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
22598     percentage)</li>
22599
22600   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
22601     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
22602     memory):
22603     <ul>
22604       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
22605       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
22606       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
22607       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
22608       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
22609       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
22610       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
22611       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
22612       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
22613       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
22614           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
22615           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
22616           activity)</li>
22617       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
22618       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
22619     </ul></li>
22620
22621   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
22622     <ul>
22623       <li>Break periods</li>
22624       <li>For teacher(s):
22625         <ul>
22626           <li>Not available periods</li>
22627           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
22628           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
22629           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
22630           <li>Min hours daily</li>
22631           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
22632
22633           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
22634             days per week</li>
22635         </ul></li>
22636       <li>For students (sets):
22637         <ul>
22638           <li>Not available periods</li>
22639           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
22640           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
22641           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
22642           <li>Min hours daily</li>
22643           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
22644
22645           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
22646             days per week</li>
22647         </ul></li>
22648       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
22649         <ul>
22650           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
22651           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
22652           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
22653           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
22654           <li>End(s) students day</li>
22655           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
22656           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
22657             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
22658           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
22659           <li>Not overlapping</li>
22660           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
22661           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
22662         </ul></li>
22663     </ul></li>
22664
22665   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
22666     <ul>
22667       <li>Room not available periods</li>
22668       <li>For teacher(s):
22669         <ul>
22670           <li>Home room(s)</li>
22671           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
22672           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
22673         </ul>
22674       </li>
22675
22676       <li>For students (sets):
22677         <ul>
22678           <li>Home room(s)</li>
22679           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
22680           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
22681         </ul>
22682       </li>
22683       <li>Preferred room(s):
22684         <ul>
22685           <li>For a subject</li>
22686           <li>For an activity tag</li>
22687           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
22688           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
22689         </ul>
22690       </li>
22691
22692       <li>For a set of activities:
22693         <ul>
22694           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
22695         </ul>
22696       </li>
22697     </ul>
22698   </li>
22699 </ul></p>
22700
22701 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
22702 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
22703 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
22704 manually, check it out.
22705
22706 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
22707 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
22708 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
22709 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
22710 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
22711 section</a>.</p>
22712
22713       </div>
22714       <div class="tags">
22715
22716
22717         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22718
22719
22720       </div>
22721     </div>
22722     <div class="padding"></div>
22723
22724     <div class="entry">
22725       <div class="title">
22726         <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>
22727       </div>
22728       <div class="date">
22729          3rd July 2012
22730       </div>
22731       <div class="body">
22732         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
22733 project (Norwegian version of
22734 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
22735 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
22736 a problem with the municipalities using
22737 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
22738 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
22739 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
22740 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
22741 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
22742 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
22743 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
22744 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
22745 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
22746 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
22747 the From: header.</p>
22748
22749 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
22750 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
22751 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
22752 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
22753 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
22754 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
22755 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
22756 behaviour.</p>
22757
22758 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
22759 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
22760 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
22761 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
22762 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
22763 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
22764 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
22765
22766       </div>
22767       <div class="tags">
22768
22769
22770         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>.
22771
22772
22773       </div>
22774     </div>
22775     <div class="padding"></div>
22776
22777     <div class="entry">
22778       <div class="title">
22779         <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>
22780       </div>
22781       <div class="date">
22782         26th June 2012
22783       </div>
22784       <div class="body">
22785         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
22786 another interview with the people behind
22787 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
22788 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
22789 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
22790 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
22791 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
22792 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
22793 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
22794
22795 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22796
22797 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
22798 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
22799 ICT in schools</p>
22800
22801 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22802 project?</strong></p>
22803
22804 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
22805 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
22806 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
22807 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
22808
22809 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22810 Edu?</strong></p>
22811
22812 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
22813 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
22814 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
22815 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
22816
22817 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22818 Edu?</strong></p>
22819
22820 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
22821 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
22822 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
22823 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
22824 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
22825 technologies in school.</p>
22826
22827 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22828
22829 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
22830 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
22831 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
22832
22833 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22834 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22835
22836 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
22837 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
22838 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
22839 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
22840
22841 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
22842 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
22843 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
22844
22845 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
22846 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
22847 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
22848 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
22849 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
22850 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
22851 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
22852 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
22853 working there.</p>
22854
22855       </div>
22856       <div class="tags">
22857
22858
22859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
22860
22861
22862       </div>
22863     </div>
22864     <div class="padding"></div>
22865
22866     <div class="entry">
22867       <div class="title">
22868         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
22869       </div>
22870       <div class="date">
22871         24th June 2012
22872       </div>
22873       <div class="body">
22874         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
22875 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
22876 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
22877 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
22878 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
22879 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
22880 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
22881 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
22882 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
22883 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
22884 missing in my book.</p>
22885
22886 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
22887 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
22888 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
22889 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
22890 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
22891 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
22892 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
22893
22894       </div>
22895       <div class="tags">
22896
22897
22898         Tags: <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>.
22899
22900
22901       </div>
22902     </div>
22903     <div class="padding"></div>
22904
22905     <div class="entry">
22906       <div class="title">
22907         <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>
22908       </div>
22909       <div class="date">
22910         11th June 2012
22911       </div>
22912       <div class="body">
22913         <p>During my work on
22914 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
22915 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
22916 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
22917 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
22918 explanation.</p>
22919
22920 <p><ul>
22921
22922 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
22923 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
22924 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
22925 system depend on tasksel tasks in
22926 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
22927 installation.</li>
22928
22929 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
22930 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
22931 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
22932 at least try to enable it for these services:
22933 <ul>
22934
22935   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
22936     quotas.</li>
22937   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
22938   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
22939   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
22940   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
22941   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
22942
22943 </ul></li>
22944
22945 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
22946 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
22947 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
22948 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
22949
22950 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
22951 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
22952 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
22953
22954 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
22955 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
22956 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
22957 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
22958 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
22959 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
22960
22961 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
22962 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
22963 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
22964 in Wheezy.
22965
22966 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
22967 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
22968 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
22969
22970 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
22971 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
22972 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
22973 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
22974
22975 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
22976 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
22977 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
22978 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
22979
22980 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
22981 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
22982 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
22983
22984 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
22985 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
22986 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
22987
22988 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
22989 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
22990 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
22991 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
22992 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
22993
22994 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
22995 <ul>
22996
22997 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
22998 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
22999 <li>and probably more?</li>
23000 </ul></li>
23001
23002 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
23003 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
23004 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
23005 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
23006 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
23007 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
23008 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
23009 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
23010
23011
23012 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
23013 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
23014 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
23015 use.</li>
23016
23017 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
23018 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
23019 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
23020 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
23021 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
23022
23023 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
23024 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
23025 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
23026 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
23027 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
23028 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
23029
23030 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
23031 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
23032 There are at least three implementations,
23033 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
23034 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
23035 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
23036 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
23037 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
23038 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
23039 given room.</li>
23040
23041 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
23042 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
23043 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
23044 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
23045 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
23046 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
23047 investigated.</li>
23048
23049 </ul></p>
23050
23051 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
23052 version.</p>
23053
23054       </div>
23055       <div class="tags">
23056
23057
23058         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23059
23060
23061       </div>
23062     </div>
23063     <div class="padding"></div>
23064
23065     <div class="entry">
23066       <div class="title">
23067         <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>
23068       </div>
23069       <div class="date">
23070          9th June 2012
23071       </div>
23072       <div class="body">
23073         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
23074 <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
23075 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
23076 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
23077 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
23078 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
23079 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
23080 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
23081 be willing to pay for.</p>
23082
23083 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
23084 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
23085 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
23086 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
23087 Orwell</a>.</p>
23088
23089       </div>
23090       <div class="tags">
23091
23092
23093         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>.
23094
23095
23096       </div>
23097     </div>
23098     <div class="padding"></div>
23099
23100     <div class="entry">
23101       <div class="title">
23102         <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>
23103       </div>
23104       <div class="date">
23105          6th June 2012
23106       </div>
23107       <div class="body">
23108         <p>A few days ago
23109 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
23110 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
23111 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
23112 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
23113 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
23114 code for HP, Dell and IBM
23115 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
23116 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
23117 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
23118 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
23119 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
23120
23121 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
23122 output:
23123
23124 <blockquote><pre>
23125 % 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>
23126 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": ""})
23127 %
23128 </pre></blockquote>
23129
23130 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
23131 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
23132 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
23133
23134       </div>
23135       <div class="tags">
23136
23137
23138         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>.
23139
23140
23141       </div>
23142     </div>
23143     <div class="padding"></div>
23144
23145     <div class="entry">
23146       <div class="title">
23147         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
23148       </div>
23149       <div class="date">
23150          2nd June 2012
23151       </div>
23152       <div class="body">
23153         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
23154 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
23155 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
23156 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
23157 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
23158 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
23159
23160 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23161
23162 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
23163 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
23164 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
23165 by Angela).</p>
23166
23167 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
23168 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
23169 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
23170 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
23171 becoming an osteopath.</p>
23172
23173 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
23174 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
23175 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
23176 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
23177 skills with communication skills.</p>
23178
23179 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23180 project?</strong></p>
23181
23182 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
23183 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
23184 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
23185 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
23186 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
23187
23188 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
23189 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
23190 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
23191 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
23192 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
23193 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
23194 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
23195 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
23196 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
23197
23198 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
23199 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
23200 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
23201
23202 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
23203
23204 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
23205 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
23206 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
23207 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
23208 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
23209 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
23210 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
23211 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
23212 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
23213 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
23214 point.</p>
23215
23216 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
23217 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
23218 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
23219 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
23220 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
23221 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
23222
23223 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
23224 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
23225 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
23226 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
23227 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
23228 spare time.</p>
23229
23230 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
23231 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
23232 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
23233 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
23234 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
23235
23236 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
23237 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
23238 avoidance do exist.</p>
23239
23240 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
23241 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
23242 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
23243 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
23244 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
23245 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
23246 and probably a gain for all.</p>
23247
23248 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23249 Edu?</strong></p>
23250
23251 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
23252 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
23253 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
23254 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
23255 project communication, honest communication within the group of
23256 developers, etc.</p>
23257
23258 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23259 Edu?</strong></p>
23260
23261 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
23262
23263 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
23264 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
23265 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
23266 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
23267 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
23268 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
23269 contribute).</p>
23270
23271 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
23272 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
23273 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
23274 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
23275 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
23276 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
23277 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
23278 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
23279 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
23280 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
23281
23282 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23283
23284 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
23285
23286 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
23287 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
23288 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
23289
23290 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
23291 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
23292 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
23293 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
23294
23295 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
23296 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
23297 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
23298 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
23299 whiteboard.</p>
23300
23301 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
23302
23303 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23304 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23305
23306 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
23307 enrol people.</p>
23308
23309       </div>
23310       <div class="tags">
23311
23312
23313         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
23314
23315
23316       </div>
23317     </div>
23318     <div class="padding"></div>
23319
23320     <div class="entry">
23321       <div class="title">
23322         <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>
23323       </div>
23324       <div class="date">
23325          1st June 2012
23326       </div>
23327       <div class="body">
23328         <p>A few years ago I wrote
23329 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
23330 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
23331 I have learned from colleges here at the
23332 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
23333 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
23334 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
23335 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
23336 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
23337
23338 <p><pre>
23339 use strict;
23340 use warnings;
23341 use SOAP::Lite;
23342 use Data::Dumper;
23343 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
23344 my $App = 'test';
23345 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
23346 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
23347 my $s = SOAP::Lite
23348     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
23349     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
23350     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
23351     ;
23352 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
23353     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
23354     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
23355     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
23356 );
23357 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
23358 </pre></p>
23359
23360 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
23361
23362 <p><pre>
23363 $VAR1 = {
23364           'Asset' => {
23365                      'Entitlements' => {
23366                                        'EntitlementData' => [
23367                                                             {
23368                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
23369                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
23370                                                               'Provider' => '',
23371                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
23372                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
23373                                                             },
23374                                                             {
23375                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
23376                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
23377                                                               'Provider' => '',
23378                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
23379                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
23380                                                             },
23381                                                             {
23382                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
23383                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
23384                                                               'Provider' => '',
23385                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
23386                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
23387                                                             }
23388                                                           ]
23389                                      },
23390                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
23391                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
23392                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
23393                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
23394                                           'Buid' => '2323',
23395                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
23396                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
23397                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
23398                                         }
23399                    }
23400         };
23401 </pre></p>
23402
23403 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
23404 service outside the
23405 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
23406 documentation</a>, and according to
23407 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
23408 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
23409 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
23410
23411 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
23412 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
23413
23414       </div>
23415       <div class="tags">
23416
23417
23418         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>.
23419
23420
23421       </div>
23422     </div>
23423     <div class="padding"></div>
23424
23425     <div class="entry">
23426       <div class="title">
23427         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
23428       </div>
23429       <div class="date">
23430         31st May 2012
23431       </div>
23432       <div class="body">
23433         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
23434 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
23435 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
23436 running Debian Squeeze, where
23437 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
23438 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
23439 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
23440 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
23441 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
23442 another day.</p>
23443
23444 <p>After calibration, I get a
23445 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
23446 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
23447 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
23448 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
23449 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
23450 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
23451 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
23452 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
23453 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
23454 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
23455 and a simple</p>
23456
23457 <p><pre>
23458 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
23459 </pre></p>
23460
23461 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
23462 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
23463 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
23464 enough for now.</p>
23465
23466       </div>
23467       <div class="tags">
23468
23469
23470         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23471
23472
23473       </div>
23474     </div>
23475     <div class="padding"></div>
23476
23477     <div class="entry">
23478       <div class="title">
23479         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
23480       </div>
23481       <div class="date">
23482         27th May 2012
23483       </div>
23484       <div class="body">
23485         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
23486 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
23487 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
23488 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
23489 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
23490 since then, helping to make sure the
23491 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
23492 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
23493
23494 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23495
23496 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
23497 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
23498 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
23499 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
23500 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
23501 our computer network.</p>
23502
23503 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
23504 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
23505 (4 months).</p>
23506
23507 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23508 project?</strong></p>
23509
23510 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
23511 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
23512 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
23513 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
23514 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
23515 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
23516 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
23517 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
23518 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
23519 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
23520 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
23521 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
23522 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
23523 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
23524
23525 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23526 Edu?</strong></p>
23527
23528 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
23529 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
23530 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
23531 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
23532 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
23533 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
23534 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
23535 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
23536
23537 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23538 Edu?</strong></p>
23539
23540 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
23541 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
23542 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
23543 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
23544 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
23545 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
23546 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
23547 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
23548 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
23549 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
23550 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
23551 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
23552
23553 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23554
23555 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
23556 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
23557 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
23558
23559 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23560 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23561
23562 <p><ol>
23563
23564 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
23565 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
23566 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
23567 developing.</li>
23568
23569 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
23570 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
23571 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
23572 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
23573 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
23574
23575 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
23576 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
23577 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
23578
23579 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
23580 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
23581 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
23582 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
23583
23584 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
23585 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
23586 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
23587
23588 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
23589
23590 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
23591 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
23592 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
23593 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
23594
23595 </ol></p>
23596
23597       </div>
23598       <div class="tags">
23599
23600
23601         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
23602
23603
23604       </div>
23605     </div>
23606     <div class="padding"></div>
23607
23608     <div class="entry">
23609       <div class="title">
23610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
23611       </div>
23612       <div class="date">
23613         26th May 2012
23614       </div>
23615       <div class="body">
23616         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
23617 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
23618 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
23619 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
23620 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
23621
23622 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
23623 <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>
23624 comment:</p>
23625
23626 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
23627 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
23628 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
23629 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
23630 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
23631 </blockquote></p>
23632
23633 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
23634 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
23635 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
23636 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
23637 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
23638 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
23639 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
23640 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
23641 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
23642 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
23643 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
23644 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
23645 of wasted effort.</p>
23646
23647 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
23648 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
23649 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
23650
23651 <p>See
23652 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
23653 and
23654 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
23655 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
23656 </blockquote></p>
23657
23658       </div>
23659       <div class="tags">
23660
23661
23662         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>.
23663
23664
23665       </div>
23666     </div>
23667     <div class="padding"></div>
23668
23669     <div class="entry">
23670       <div class="title">
23671         <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>
23672       </div>
23673       <div class="date">
23674         18th May 2012
23675       </div>
23676       <div class="body">
23677         <p>In january, I
23678 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
23679 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
23680 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
23681 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
23682 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
23683 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
23684 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
23685 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
23686 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
23687 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
23688
23689 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
23690 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
23691 drivers. :)</p>
23692
23693       </div>
23694       <div class="tags">
23695
23696
23697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23698
23699
23700       </div>
23701     </div>
23702     <div class="padding"></div>
23703
23704     <div class="entry">
23705       <div class="title">
23706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
23707       </div>
23708       <div class="date">
23709         13th May 2012
23710       </div>
23711       <div class="body">
23712         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
23713 publish another interview with the people behind
23714 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
23715 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
23716 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
23717 details get right before release.
23718
23719 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23720
23721 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
23722 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
23723 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
23724 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
23725 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
23726 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
23727 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
23728 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
23729
23730 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
23731 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
23732 home since 2006.</p>
23733
23734 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23735 project?</strong></p>
23736
23737 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
23738 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
23739 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
23740 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
23741 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
23742 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
23743
23744 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
23745 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
23746 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
23747 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
23748 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
23749 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
23750 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
23751 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
23752 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
23753 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
23754 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
23755 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
23756 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
23757 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
23758 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
23759 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
23760
23761 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23762 Edu?</strong></p>
23763
23764 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
23765 for me as today.</p>
23766
23767 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
23768
23769 <p><ul>
23770
23771 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
23772 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
23773
23774 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
23775 cost.</li>
23776
23777 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
23778 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
23779 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
23780 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
23781 server</li>
23782
23783 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
23784 school.</li>
23785
23786 </ul></p>
23787
23788 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
23789 came up in this way:</p>
23790
23791 <p><ul>
23792
23793 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
23794 now.</li>
23795
23796 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
23797 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
23798 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
23799
23800 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
23801 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
23802 interfaces used in the past.</li>
23803
23804 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
23805 different needs.</li>
23806
23807 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
23808
23809 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
23810 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
23811 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
23812
23813 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
23814 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
23815
23816 </ul></p>
23817
23818 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23819 Edu?</strong></p>
23820
23821 <p><ul>
23822
23823 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
23824 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
23825 whole municipality areas.</li>
23826
23827 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
23828 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
23829 politicians.</li>
23830
23831 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
23832
23833 </ul></p>
23834
23835 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23836
23837 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
23838 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
23839 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
23840 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
23841 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
23842 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
23843
23844 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
23845 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
23846 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
23847 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
23848 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
23849
23850 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23851 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23852
23853 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
23854 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
23855 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
23856
23857       </div>
23858       <div class="tags">
23859
23860
23861         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
23862
23863
23864       </div>
23865     </div>
23866     <div class="padding"></div>
23867
23868     <div class="entry">
23869       <div class="title">
23870         <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>
23871       </div>
23872       <div class="date">
23873         30th April 2012
23874       </div>
23875       <div class="body">
23876         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
23877 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
23878
23879 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
23880 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
23881 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
23882 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
23883 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
23884 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
23885 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
23886 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
23887 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
23888 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
23889 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
23890 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
23891 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
23892 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
23893 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
23894 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
23895
23896 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
23897 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
23898 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
23899 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
23900 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
23901 finally found a Danish supplier
23902 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
23903 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
23904 days ago.</p>
23905
23906 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
23907 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
23908 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
23909 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
23910 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
23911 toys.</p>
23912
23913       </div>
23914       <div class="tags">
23915
23916
23917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23918
23919
23920       </div>
23921     </div>
23922     <div class="padding"></div>
23923
23924     <div class="entry">
23925       <div class="title">
23926         <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>
23927       </div>
23928       <div class="date">
23929         26th April 2012
23930       </div>
23931       <div class="body">
23932         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
23933 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
23934 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
23935 that the video editor application included with
23936 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
23937 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
23938 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
23939
23940 <p><blockquote>
23941 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
23942 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
23943 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
23944 </blockquote></p>
23945
23946 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
23947
23948 <p><blockquote>
23949 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
23950 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
23951 </blockquote></p>
23952
23953 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
23954 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
23955 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
23956 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
23957 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
23958 video.  AMR is
23959 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
23960 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
23961 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
23962 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
23963 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
23964 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
23965 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
23966
23967 <p>I know why I prefer
23968 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
23969 standards</a> also for video.</p>
23970
23971       </div>
23972       <div class="tags">
23973
23974
23975         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>.
23976
23977
23978       </div>
23979     </div>
23980     <div class="padding"></div>
23981
23982     <div class="entry">
23983       <div class="title">
23984         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
23985       </div>
23986       <div class="date">
23987         19th April 2012
23988       </div>
23989       <div class="body">
23990         <p>Here in Norway, the
23991 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
23992 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
23993 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
23994 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
23995 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
23996 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
23997 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
23998 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
23999 on the same level.</p>
24000
24001 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
24002 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
24003 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
24004 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
24005 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
24006 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
24007 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
24008 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
24009 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
24010 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
24011 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
24012 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
24013 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
24014 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
24015 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
24016 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
24017 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
24018 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
24019
24020 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
24021 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
24022 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
24023 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
24024 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
24025 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
24026 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
24027 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
24028
24029 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
24030 from Simon Phipps
24031 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
24032 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
24033
24034 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
24035 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
24036 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
24037 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
24038 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
24039 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
24040 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
24041 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
24042 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
24043
24044       </div>
24045       <div class="tags">
24046
24047
24048         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>.
24049
24050
24051       </div>
24052     </div>
24053     <div class="padding"></div>
24054
24055     <div class="entry">
24056       <div class="title">
24057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
24058       </div>
24059       <div class="date">
24060         15th April 2012
24061       </div>
24062       <div class="body">
24063         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
24064 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
24065 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
24066 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
24067 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
24068 up in the recently released
24069 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
24070 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
24071
24072 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
24073
24074 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
24075 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
24076 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
24077 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
24078 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
24079 information technology and science/technology.</p>
24080
24081 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
24082 project?</strong></p>
24083
24084 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
24085 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
24086 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
24087 contributing.</p>
24088
24089 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24090 Edu?</strong></p>
24091
24092 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
24093 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
24094 Debian Project!</p>
24095
24096 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24097 Edu?</strong></p>
24098
24099 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
24100 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
24101 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
24102 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
24103 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
24104 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
24105 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
24106
24107 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
24108 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
24109
24110 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
24111
24112 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
24113 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
24114 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
24115 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
24116
24117 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
24118 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
24119
24120 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
24121 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
24122 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
24123 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
24124 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
24125 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
24126 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
24127
24128 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
24129 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
24130 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
24131 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
24132 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
24133 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
24134 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
24135 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
24136
24137       </div>
24138       <div class="tags">
24139
24140
24141         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24142
24143
24144       </div>
24145     </div>
24146     <div class="padding"></div>
24147
24148     <div class="entry">
24149       <div class="title">
24150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
24151       </div>
24152       <div class="date">
24153          8th April 2012
24154       </div>
24155       <div class="body">
24156         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
24157 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
24158 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
24159 contributor to the
24160 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
24161 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
24162
24163 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
24164
24165 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
24166 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
24167
24168 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
24169 project?</strong></p>
24170
24171 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
24172 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
24173 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
24174 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
24175 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
24176 "localisation".</p>
24177
24178 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24179 Edu?</strong></p>
24180
24181 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24182 Edu?</strong></p>
24183
24184 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
24185 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
24186 education system.</p>
24187
24188 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
24189 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
24190 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
24191 money on the latest hardware.</p>
24192
24193 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
24194
24195 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
24196 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
24197 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
24198
24199 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
24200 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
24201
24202 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
24203 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
24204 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
24205
24206       </div>
24207       <div class="tags">
24208
24209
24210         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24211
24212
24213       </div>
24214     </div>
24215     <div class="padding"></div>
24216
24217     <div class="entry">
24218       <div class="title">
24219         <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>
24220       </div>
24221       <div class="date">
24222          6th April 2012
24223       </div>
24224       <div class="body">
24225         <p>Recently I have spent time with
24226 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
24227 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
24228 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
24229 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
24230 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
24231 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
24232 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
24233 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
24234
24235 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
24236 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
24237 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
24238 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
24239 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
24240 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
24241 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
24242 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
24243
24244 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
24245 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
24246 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
24247 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
24248 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
24249 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
24250 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
24251 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
24252
24253 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
24254 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
24255 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
24256 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
24257 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
24258 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
24259 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
24260 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
24261 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
24262 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
24263
24264 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
24265 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
24266 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
24267 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
24268
24269 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
24270 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
24271
24272 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
24273 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
24274 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
24275 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
24276
24277       </div>
24278       <div class="tags">
24279
24280
24281         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24282
24283
24284       </div>
24285     </div>
24286     <div class="padding"></div>
24287
24288     <div class="entry">
24289       <div class="title">
24290         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
24291       </div>
24292       <div class="date">
24293          5th April 2012
24294       </div>
24295       <div class="body">
24296         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
24297 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
24298 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
24299 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
24300 for schools.  Check out his article
24301 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
24302 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
24303
24304       </div>
24305       <div class="tags">
24306
24307
24308         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24309
24310
24311       </div>
24312     </div>
24313     <div class="padding"></div>
24314
24315     <div class="entry">
24316       <div class="title">
24317         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
24318       </div>
24319       <div class="date">
24320          1st April 2012
24321       </div>
24322       <div class="body">
24323         <p>Germany is a core area for the
24324 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
24325 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
24326 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
24327
24328 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
24329
24330 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
24331 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
24332 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
24333 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
24334 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
24335 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
24336 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
24337 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
24338
24339 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
24340 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
24341 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
24342 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
24343 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
24344 the end of April this year.</p>
24345
24346 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
24347 project?</strong></p>
24348
24349 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
24350 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
24351 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
24352 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
24353 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
24354 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
24355 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
24356 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
24357 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
24358 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
24359 Skolelinux.</p>
24360
24361 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
24362 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
24363 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
24364 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
24365 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
24366 the admin teachers.</p>
24367
24368 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24369 Edu?</strong></p>
24370
24371 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
24372 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
24373 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
24374
24375 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
24376 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
24377 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
24378 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
24379 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
24380
24381 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24382 Edu?</strong></p>
24383
24384 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
24385
24386 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
24387
24388 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
24389 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
24390 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
24391 LibreOffice.</p>
24392
24393 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
24394 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
24395
24396 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
24397 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
24398 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
24399
24400       </div>
24401       <div class="tags">
24402
24403
24404         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24405
24406
24407       </div>
24408     </div>
24409     <div class="padding"></div>
24410
24411     <div class="entry">
24412       <div class="title">
24413         <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>
24414       </div>
24415       <div class="date">
24416         25th March 2012
24417       </div>
24418       <div class="body">
24419         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
24420
24421 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
24422 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
24423 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
24424 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
24425 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
24426 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
24427 and download as a
24428 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
24429 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
24430
24431 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
24432   <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"' />
24433     <p>Download video as
24434       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
24435 </video></p>
24436
24437       </div>
24438       <div class="tags">
24439
24440
24441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24442
24443
24444       </div>
24445     </div>
24446     <div class="padding"></div>
24447
24448     <div class="entry">
24449       <div class="title">
24450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
24451       </div>
24452       <div class="date">
24453         19th March 2012
24454       </div>
24455       <div class="body">
24456         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
24457 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
24458 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
24459 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
24460 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
24461
24462 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
24463
24464 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
24465 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
24466 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
24467 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
24468 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
24469 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
24470 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
24471 installations.</p>
24472
24473 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
24474 project?</strong></p>
24475
24476 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
24477 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
24478 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
24479 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
24480 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
24481 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
24482 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
24483 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
24484 these things we decided to try it.</p>
24485
24486 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24487 Edu?</strong></p>
24488
24489 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
24490 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
24491 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
24492 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
24493 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
24494 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
24495 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
24496 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
24497
24498 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24499 Edu?</strong></p>
24500
24501 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
24502 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
24503 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
24504 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
24505 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
24506
24507 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
24508
24509 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
24510 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
24511 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
24512 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
24513 that counts...)</p>
24514
24515 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
24516 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
24517
24518 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
24519 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
24520 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
24521 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
24522 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
24523 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
24524 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
24525 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
24526 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
24527 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
24528 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
24529
24530 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
24531 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
24532 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
24533
24534       </div>
24535       <div class="tags">
24536
24537
24538         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24539
24540
24541       </div>
24542     </div>
24543     <div class="padding"></div>
24544
24545     <div class="entry">
24546       <div class="title">
24547         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
24548       </div>
24549       <div class="date">
24550         16th March 2012
24551       </div>
24552       <div class="body">
24553         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
24554 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
24555 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
24556 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
24557
24558 <ol>
24559
24560 <li>The documentation is written in a
24561 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
24562 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
24563 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
24564 docbook XML.</li>
24565
24566 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
24567 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
24568 with the translated text.</li>
24569
24570 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
24571 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
24572 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
24573 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
24574 images.</li>
24575
24576 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
24577 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
24578
24579 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
24580 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
24581
24582 </ol>
24583
24584 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
24585 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
24586 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
24587 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
24588 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
24589
24590 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
24591 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
24592 package</a>.</p>
24593
24594       </div>
24595       <div class="tags">
24596
24597
24598         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24599
24600
24601       </div>
24602     </div>
24603     <div class="padding"></div>
24604
24605     <div class="entry">
24606       <div class="title">
24607         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
24608       </div>
24609       <div class="date">
24610         11th March 2012
24611       </div>
24612       <div class="body">
24613         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
24614 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
24615 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
24616 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
24617 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
24618 you have not done so already.</p>
24619
24620 <p>I plan to present the new version at
24621 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
24622 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
24623 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
24624
24625       </div>
24626       <div class="tags">
24627
24628
24629         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24630
24631
24632       </div>
24633     </div>
24634     <div class="padding"></div>
24635
24636     <div class="entry">
24637       <div class="title">
24638         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
24639       </div>
24640       <div class="date">
24641          9th March 2012
24642       </div>
24643       <div class="body">
24644         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
24645 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
24646 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
24647 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
24648 more international audience.</p>
24649
24650 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
24651 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
24652 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
24653 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
24654 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
24655 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
24656 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
24657
24658
24659 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
24660
24661 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
24662 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
24663 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
24664 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
24665 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
24666 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
24667 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
24668 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
24669 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
24670 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
24671 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
24672
24673 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
24674 project?</strong></p>
24675
24676 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
24677 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
24678 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
24679 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
24680 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
24681 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
24682 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
24683 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
24684 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
24685 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
24686 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
24687 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
24688 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
24689
24690 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24691 Edu?</strong></p>
24692
24693 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
24694 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
24695 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
24696 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
24697 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
24698 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
24699 Japan.</p>
24700
24701 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
24702 Edu?</strong></p>
24703
24704 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
24705 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
24706 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
24707 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
24708 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
24709 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
24710 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
24711 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
24712 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
24713 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
24714 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
24715 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
24716 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
24717 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
24718 help.</p>
24719
24720 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
24721
24722 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
24723 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
24724 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
24725 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
24726 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
24727 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
24728 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
24729 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
24730 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
24731 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
24732 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
24733
24734 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
24735 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
24736
24737 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
24738 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
24739 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
24740 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
24741 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
24742 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
24743 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
24744 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
24745 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
24746 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
24747 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
24748 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
24749
24750       </div>
24751       <div class="tags">
24752
24753
24754         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24755
24756
24757       </div>
24758     </div>
24759     <div class="padding"></div>
24760
24761     <div class="entry">
24762       <div class="title">
24763         <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>
24764       </div>
24765       <div class="date">
24766          7th March 2012
24767       </div>
24768       <div class="body">
24769         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
24770
24771 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
24772 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
24773 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
24774 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
24775 download as a
24776 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
24777 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
24778
24779 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
24780   <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"' />
24781     <p>Download video as
24782       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
24783 </video></p>
24784
24785       </div>
24786       <div class="tags">
24787
24788
24789         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24790
24791
24792       </div>
24793     </div>
24794     <div class="padding"></div>
24795
24796     <div class="entry">
24797       <div class="title">
24798         <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>
24799       </div>
24800       <div class="date">
24801          4th March 2012
24802       </div>
24803       <div class="body">
24804         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
24805 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
24806 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
24807 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
24808 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
24809 need a software solution for your school.</p>
24810
24811       </div>
24812       <div class="tags">
24813
24814
24815         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24816
24817
24818       </div>
24819     </div>
24820     <div class="padding"></div>
24821
24822     <div class="entry">
24823       <div class="title">
24824         <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>
24825       </div>
24826       <div class="date">
24827          3rd March 2012
24828       </div>
24829       <div class="body">
24830         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
24831 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
24832 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
24833 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
24834 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
24835 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
24836 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
24837 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
24838 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
24839 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
24840 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
24841 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
24842 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
24843 year...</p>
24844
24845 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
24846 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
24847 name,
24848 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
24849 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
24850 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
24851 mean). I've been following
24852 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
24853 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
24854 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
24855 Check it out. :)</p>
24856
24857       </div>
24858       <div class="tags">
24859
24860
24861         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24862
24863
24864       </div>
24865     </div>
24866     <div class="padding"></div>
24867
24868     <div class="entry">
24869       <div class="title">
24870         <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>
24871       </div>
24872       <div class="date">
24873         27th February 2012
24874       </div>
24875       <div class="body">
24876         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
24877 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
24878 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
24879 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
24880 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
24881 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
24882 need a software solution for your school.</p>
24883
24884       </div>
24885       <div class="tags">
24886
24887
24888         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24889
24890
24891       </div>
24892     </div>
24893     <div class="padding"></div>
24894
24895     <div class="entry">
24896       <div class="title">
24897         <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>
24898       </div>
24899       <div class="date">
24900         19th February 2012
24901       </div>
24902       <div class="body">
24903         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
24904 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
24905 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
24906 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
24907 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
24908 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
24909 solution for your school.</p>
24910
24911       </div>
24912       <div class="tags">
24913
24914
24915         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24916
24917
24918       </div>
24919     </div>
24920     <div class="padding"></div>
24921
24922     <div class="entry">
24923       <div class="title">
24924         <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>
24925       </div>
24926       <div class="date">
24927         14th February 2012
24928       </div>
24929       <div class="body">
24930         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
24931 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
24932 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
24933 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
24934 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
24935 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
24936 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
24937 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
24938 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
24939
24940 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
24941 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
24942 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
24943 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
24944 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
24945
24946 <blockquote><pre>
24947 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
24948 do
24949     printf "Failed disk $d: "
24950     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
24951 done
24952 </blockquote></pre>
24953
24954 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
24955 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
24956
24957 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
24958
24959 <blockquote><pre>
24960 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
24961 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
24962 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
24963 </blockquote></pre>
24964
24965 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
24966 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
24967 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
24968 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
24969 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
24970 mounted inside my box.</p>
24971
24972 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
24973 Software RAID in the
24974 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
24975 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
24976 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
24977 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
24978 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
24979 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
24980
24981       </div>
24982       <div class="tags">
24983
24984
24985         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>.
24986
24987
24988       </div>
24989     </div>
24990     <div class="padding"></div>
24991
24992     <div class="entry">
24993       <div class="title">
24994         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
24995       </div>
24996       <div class="date">
24997         13th February 2012
24998       </div>
24999       <div class="body">
25000         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
25001 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
25002 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
25003 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
25004 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
25005 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
25006 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
25007 change the global proxy setting by editing
25008 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
25009 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
25010
25011 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
25012 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
25013 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
25014
25015 <blockquote><pre>
25016 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
25017 {
25018    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
25019        isPlainHostName(host) ||
25020        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
25021       return "DIRECT";
25022    else
25023       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
25024 }
25025 </pre></blockquote>
25026
25027 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
25028
25029 <blockquote><pre>
25030 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
25031 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
25032 </pre></blockquote>
25033
25034 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
25035 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
25036 would be used for
25037 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
25038 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
25039 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
25040 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
25041 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
25042 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
25043 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
25044 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
25045 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
25046 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
25047
25048 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
25049 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
25050 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
25051 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
25052 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
25053 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
25054
25055 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
25056 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
25057 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
25058 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
25059 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
25060 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
25061 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
25062 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
25063 the network setup changes.</p>
25064
25065 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
25066 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
25067 draft</a> and a
25068 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
25069 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
25070
25071       </div>
25072       <div class="tags">
25073
25074
25075         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25076
25077
25078       </div>
25079     </div>
25080     <div class="padding"></div>
25081
25082     <div class="entry">
25083       <div class="title">
25084         <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>
25085       </div>
25086       <div class="date">
25087          5th February 2012
25088       </div>
25089       <div class="body">
25090         <p>Since the Lenny version of
25091 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
25092 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
25093 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
25094 in the morning.  This is done using the
25095 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
25096
25097 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
25098 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
25099 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
25100 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
25101 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
25102 the
25103 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
25104 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
25105 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
25106 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
25107 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
25108
25109 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
25110 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
25111 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
25112 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
25113 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
25114 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
25115 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
25116
25117 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
25118 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
25119 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
25120 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
25121 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
25122
25123       </div>
25124       <div class="tags">
25125
25126
25127         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25128
25129
25130       </div>
25131     </div>
25132     <div class="padding"></div>
25133
25134     <div class="entry">
25135       <div class="title">
25136         <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>
25137       </div>
25138       <div class="date">
25139          4th February 2012
25140       </div>
25141       <div class="body">
25142         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
25143 publish the third beta version of
25144 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
25145 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
25146 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
25147 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
25148 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
25149 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
25150 on the project announcement list.</p>
25151
25152 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
25153 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
25154
25155 <ul>
25156
25157 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
25158   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
25159   the installation.</li>
25160
25161 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
25162   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
25163
25164 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
25165   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
25166   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
25167
25168 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
25169   for the local system administrator is created during installation
25170   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
25171   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
25172   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
25173   up to date on the system.</li>
25174
25175 </ul>
25176
25177 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
25178 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
25179 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
25180 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
25181
25182 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
25183 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
25184 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
25185 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
25186 will see you there?</p>
25187
25188       </div>
25189       <div class="tags">
25190
25191
25192         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25193
25194
25195       </div>
25196     </div>
25197     <div class="padding"></div>
25198
25199     <div class="entry">
25200       <div class="title">
25201         <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>
25202       </div>
25203       <div class="date">
25204         27th January 2012
25205       </div>
25206       <div class="body">
25207         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
25208 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
25209 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
25210 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
25211 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
25212 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
25213 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
25214
25215 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
25216 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
25217 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
25218 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
25219 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
25220 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
25221 not taken care of by this.</p>
25222
25223 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
25224 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
25225 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
25226 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
25227 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
25228 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
25229 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
25230 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
25231 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
25232 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
25233 firmware packages.</p>
25234
25235 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
25236 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
25237 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
25238 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
25239 initrd with extra firmware, the
25240 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
25241 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
25242 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
25243
25244 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
25245 network cards working.  For this,
25246 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
25247 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
25248 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
25249
25250 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
25251 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
25252 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
25253
25254 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
25255 try.</p>
25256
25257       </div>
25258       <div class="tags">
25259
25260
25261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25262
25263
25264       </div>
25265     </div>
25266     <div class="padding"></div>
25267
25268     <div class="entry">
25269       <div class="title">
25270         <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>
25271       </div>
25272       <div class="date">
25273         25th January 2012
25274       </div>
25275       <div class="body">
25276         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
25277 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
25278 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
25279 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
25280 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
25281
25282 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
25283 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
25284 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
25285 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
25286 this is done, log on to the central server and run
25287 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
25288 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
25289 will look similar to this:</p>
25290
25291 <p><blockquote><pre>
25292 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
25293 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
25294 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.
25295
25296 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
25297
25298 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25299 enter password: *******
25300 %
25301 </pre></blockquote></p>
25302
25303 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
25304 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
25305 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
25306 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
25307 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
25308 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
25309 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
25310 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
25311 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
25312 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
25313 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
25314 automatically.</p>
25315
25316 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
25317 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
25318
25319 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
25320 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
25321 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
25322
25323       </div>
25324       <div class="tags">
25325
25326
25327         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25328
25329
25330       </div>
25331     </div>
25332     <div class="padding"></div>
25333
25334     <div class="entry">
25335       <div class="title">
25336         <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>
25337       </div>
25338       <div class="date">
25339         10th January 2012
25340       </div>
25341       <div class="body">
25342         <p>In the Squeeze version of
25343 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
25344 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
25345 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
25346 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
25347 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
25348 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
25349 first time.</p>
25350
25351 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
25352 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
25353 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
25354 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
25355
25356 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
25357 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
25358 new setting.</p>
25359
25360 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
25361 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
25362 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
25363
25364       </div>
25365       <div class="tags">
25366
25367
25368         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25369
25370
25371       </div>
25372     </div>
25373     <div class="padding"></div>
25374
25375     <div class="entry">
25376       <div class="title">
25377         <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>
25378       </div>
25379       <div class="date">
25380          7th January 2012
25381       </div>
25382       <div class="body">
25383         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
25384 the second beta version of
25385 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
25386 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
25387 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
25388 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
25389 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
25390 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
25391 on the project announcement list.</p>
25392
25393       </div>
25394       <div class="tags">
25395
25396
25397         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25398
25399
25400       </div>
25401     </div>
25402     <div class="padding"></div>
25403
25404     <div class="entry">
25405       <div class="title">
25406         <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>
25407       </div>
25408       <div class="date">
25409          3rd January 2012
25410       </div>
25411       <div class="body">
25412         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
25413 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
25414 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
25415 interesting.</p>
25416
25417 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
25418 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
25419 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
25420 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
25421 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
25422 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
25423 wrap up its tasks.</p>
25424
25425 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
25426 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
25427 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
25428 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
25429 because I was typing.</P>
25430
25431 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
25432 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
25433 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
25434 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
25435 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
25436 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
25437 generate entropy.</p>
25438
25439 <p>The fix is in
25440 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
25441 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
25442 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
25443 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
25444
25445       </div>
25446       <div class="tags">
25447
25448
25449         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25450
25451
25452       </div>
25453     </div>
25454     <div class="padding"></div>
25455
25456     <div class="entry">
25457       <div class="title">
25458         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
25459       </div>
25460       <div class="date">
25461         21st November 2011
25462       </div>
25463       <div class="body">
25464         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
25465 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
25466 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
25467 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
25468 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
25469 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
25470 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
25471 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
25472 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
25473 the tools to do so.</p>
25474
25475 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
25476 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
25477 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
25478 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
25479
25480 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
25481 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
25482 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
25483 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
25484 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
25485 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
25486 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
25487 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
25488
25489 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
25490 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
25491 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
25492
25493 <p><pre>
25494 #!/usr/bin/perl
25495 use strict;
25496 use warnings;
25497 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
25498 BEGIN {
25499     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
25500     my %rhelmodules = (
25501         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
25502         );
25503     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
25504         eval "use $module;";
25505         if ($@) {
25506             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
25507             system("yum install -y $pkg");
25508             eval "use $module;";
25509         }
25510     }
25511 }
25512 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
25513
25514 upgrade_dell();
25515
25516 exit 0;
25517
25518 sub run_firmware_script {
25519     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
25520     unless ($script) {
25521         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
25522         exit 1
25523     }
25524     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
25525
25526     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
25527         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
25528     } else {
25529         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
25530     }
25531 }
25532
25533 sub run_firmware_scripts {
25534     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
25535     # Run firmware packages
25536     for my $dir (@dirs) {
25537         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
25538         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
25539         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
25540             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
25541             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
25542         }
25543         closedir $dh;
25544     }
25545 }
25546
25547 sub download {
25548     my $url = shift;
25549     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
25550     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
25551 }
25552
25553 sub upgrade_dell {
25554     my @dirs;
25555     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
25556     chomp $product;
25557
25558     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
25559
25560         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
25561         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
25562
25563         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
25564             CLEANUP => 1
25565             );
25566         chdir($tmpdir);
25567         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
25568         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
25569         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
25570         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
25571         my $fwopts = "-q";
25572         if (@paths) {
25573             for my $url (@paths) {
25574                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
25575             }
25576             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
25577         } else {
25578             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
25579             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
25580         }
25581         chdir('/');
25582     } else {
25583         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
25584         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
25585     }
25586 }
25587
25588 sub fetch_dell_fw {
25589     my $path = shift;
25590     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
25591     download($url);
25592 }
25593
25594 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
25595 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
25596 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
25597 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
25598     my $filename = shift;
25599
25600     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
25601     chomp $product;
25602     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
25603
25604     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
25605
25606     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
25607     my @paths;
25608     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
25609         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
25610         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
25611         my $oscode;
25612         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
25613             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
25614         } else {
25615             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
25616         }
25617         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
25618         {
25619             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
25620         }
25621     }
25622     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
25623         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
25624
25625         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
25626         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
25627
25628         my $cpath = $component->{path};
25629         for my $path (@paths) {
25630             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
25631                 push(@paths, $cpath);
25632             }
25633         }
25634     }
25635     return @paths;
25636 }
25637 </pre>
25638
25639 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
25640 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
25641 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
25642 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
25643 outdated.</p>
25644
25645       </div>
25646       <div class="tags">
25647
25648
25649         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
25650
25651
25652       </div>
25653     </div>
25654     <div class="padding"></div>
25655
25656     <div class="entry">
25657       <div class="title">
25658         <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>
25659       </div>
25660       <div class="date">
25661          7th October 2011
25662       </div>
25663       <div class="body">
25664         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
25665 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
25666 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
25667 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
25668 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
25669 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
25670 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
25671 models.</p>
25672
25673 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
25674 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
25675 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
25676 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
25677
25678 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
25679 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
25680 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
25681 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
25682 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
25683 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
25684 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
25685 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
25686 distributed.</p>
25687
25688 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
25689
25690 <ul>
25691
25692 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
25693   other relevant equipment.</li>
25694
25695 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
25696
25697 </ul>
25698
25699 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
25700 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
25701 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
25702 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
25703 books available.</p>
25704
25705 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
25706 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
25707 libraries. :)</p>
25708
25709       </div>
25710       <div class="tags">
25711
25712
25713         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>.
25714
25715
25716       </div>
25717     </div>
25718     <div class="padding"></div>
25719
25720     <div class="entry">
25721       <div class="title">
25722         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
25723       </div>
25724       <div class="date">
25725         17th September 2011
25726       </div>
25727       <div class="body">
25728         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
25729 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
25730 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
25731 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
25732 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
25733 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
25734 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
25735 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
25736
25737 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
25738
25739 <blockquote><pre>
25740 #!/bin/sh
25741 # apt-get install lsdvd
25742 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
25743 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
25744 </pre></blockquote>
25745
25746 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
25747 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
25748 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
25749 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
25750
25751 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
25752 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
25753 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
25754 back as an ISO.
25755
25756 <blockquote><pre>
25757 #!/bin/sh
25758 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
25759 set -e
25760 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
25761 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
25762 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
25763 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
25764 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
25765 </pre></blockquote>
25766
25767 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
25768
25769 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
25770 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
25771 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
25772 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
25773 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
25774
25775 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
25776 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
25777 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
25778 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
25779 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
25780 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
25781
25782       </div>
25783       <div class="tags">
25784
25785
25786         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>.
25787
25788
25789       </div>
25790     </div>
25791     <div class="padding"></div>
25792
25793     <div class="entry">
25794       <div class="title">
25795         <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>
25796       </div>
25797       <div class="date">
25798          4th August 2011
25799       </div>
25800       <div class="body">
25801         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
25802 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
25803 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
25804 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
25805 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
25806 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
25807 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
25808 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
25809 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
25810
25811 <p><blockquote>
25812 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
25813 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
25814 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
25815 </blockquote></p>
25816
25817 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
25818 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
25819 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
25820 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
25821 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
25822 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
25823 hard to explain.</p>
25824
25825 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
25826 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
25827 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
25828 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
25829 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
25830 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
25831 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
25832 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
25833 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
25834 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
25835 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
25836 mode).</p>
25837
25838 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
25839 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
25840 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
25841 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
25842 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
25843 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
25844 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
25845 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
25846 after visiting single user mode.</p>
25847
25848 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
25849 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
25850 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
25851 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
25852 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
25853 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
25854 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
25855 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
25856
25857 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
25858 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
25859 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
25860
25861       </div>
25862       <div class="tags">
25863
25864
25865         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>.
25866
25867
25868       </div>
25869     </div>
25870     <div class="padding"></div>
25871
25872     <div class="entry">
25873       <div class="title">
25874         <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>
25875       </div>
25876       <div class="date">
25877         30th July 2011
25878       </div>
25879       <div class="body">
25880         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
25881 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
25882 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
25883 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
25884 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
25885 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
25886 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
25887 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
25888 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
25889 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
25890 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
25891 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
25892 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
25893
25894 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
25895 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
25896 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
25897 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
25898 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
25899 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
25900 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
25901 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
25902 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
25903
25904 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
25905 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
25906 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
25907 is presented.</p>
25908
25909 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
25910 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
25911 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
25912 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
25913 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
25914 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
25915 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
25916 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
25917 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
25918 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
25919 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
25920 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
25921 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
25922 find time to push this forward.</p>
25923
25924       </div>
25925       <div class="tags">
25926
25927
25928         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>.
25929
25930
25931       </div>
25932     </div>
25933     <div class="padding"></div>
25934
25935     <div class="entry">
25936       <div class="title">
25937         <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>
25938       </div>
25939       <div class="date">
25940         29th July 2011
25941       </div>
25942       <div class="body">
25943         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
25944 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
25945 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
25946 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
25947 issues.</p>
25948
25949 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
25950 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
25951 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
25952
25953 <ol>
25954
25955 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
25956 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
25957 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
25958 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
25959 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
25960 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
25961 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
25962 Debian.</li>
25963
25964 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
25965 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
25966 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
25967 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
25968 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
25969 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
25970 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
25971 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
25972 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
25973 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
25974 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
25975 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
25976 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
25977
25978 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
25979 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
25980 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
25981 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
25982 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
25983 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
25984 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
25985 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
25986 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
25987 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
25988
25989 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
25990 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
25991 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
25992 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
25993 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
25994 latter behaviour.</li>
25995
25996 </ol>
25997
25998 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
25999 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
26000 it do not matter much.</p>
26001
26002 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
26003 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
26004 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
26005
26006       </div>
26007       <div class="tags">
26008
26009
26010         Tags: <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>.
26011
26012
26013       </div>
26014     </div>
26015     <div class="padding"></div>
26016
26017     <div class="entry">
26018       <div class="title">
26019         <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>
26020       </div>
26021       <div class="date">
26022         26th July 2011
26023       </div>
26024       <div class="body">
26025         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
26026 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
26027 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
26028 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
26029 security support for a few years.</p>
26030
26031 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
26032 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
26033 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
26034 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
26035 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
26036 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
26037 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
26038 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
26039 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
26040 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
26041 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
26042 easier in the future.</p>
26043
26044 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
26045 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
26046 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
26047 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
26048 do not have time for.</p>
26049
26050       </div>
26051       <div class="tags">
26052
26053
26054         Tags: <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>.
26055
26056
26057       </div>
26058     </div>
26059     <div class="padding"></div>
26060
26061     <div class="entry">
26062       <div class="title">
26063         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
26064       </div>
26065       <div class="date">
26066         20th June 2011
26067       </div>
26068       <div class="body">
26069         <p>Reading
26070 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
26071 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
26072 parts of the
26073 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
26074 and
26075 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
26076 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
26077 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
26078 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
26079
26080       </div>
26081       <div class="tags">
26082
26083
26084         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>.
26085
26086
26087       </div>
26088     </div>
26089     <div class="padding"></div>
26090
26091     <div class="entry">
26092       <div class="title">
26093         <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>
26094       </div>
26095       <div class="date">
26096         30th April 2011
26097       </div>
26098       <div class="body">
26099         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
26100 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
26101 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
26102 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
26103 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
26104 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
26105 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
26106 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
26107 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
26108 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
26109
26110 <p>Where is it?  Visit
26111 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
26112 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
26113 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
26114 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
26115
26116       </div>
26117       <div class="tags">
26118
26119
26120         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>.
26121
26122
26123       </div>
26124     </div>
26125     <div class="padding"></div>
26126
26127     <div class="entry">
26128       <div class="title">
26129         <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>
26130       </div>
26131       <div class="date">
26132         29th April 2011
26133       </div>
26134       <div class="body">
26135         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
26136 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
26137 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
26138 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
26139 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
26140 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
26141 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
26142 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
26143 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
26144 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
26145 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
26146 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
26147 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
26148
26149 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
26150 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
26151 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
26152 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
26153 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
26154 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
26155 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
26156 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
26157 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
26158 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
26159 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
26160 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
26161 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
26162
26163 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
26164 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
26165 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
26166 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
26167 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
26168 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
26169 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
26170 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
26171 it.</p>
26172
26173 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
26174 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
26175 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
26176 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
26177 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
26178 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
26179 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
26180
26181 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
26182 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
26183 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
26184 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
26185 and range= options.</p>
26186
26187 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
26188 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
26189 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
26190 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
26191 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
26192 to best handle this.  I've noticed
26193 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
26194 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
26195 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
26196 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
26197
26198 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
26199 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
26200 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
26201 discussions instead of only
26202 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
26203 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
26204 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
26205 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
26206 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
26207 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
26208
26209       </div>
26210       <div class="tags">
26211
26212
26213         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>.
26214
26215
26216       </div>
26217     </div>
26218     <div class="padding"></div>
26219
26220     <div class="entry">
26221       <div class="title">
26222         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
26223       </div>
26224       <div class="date">
26225          6th April 2011
26226       </div>
26227       <div class="body">
26228         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
26229 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
26230 A few days ago the project
26231 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
26232 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
26233 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
26234 into Gnash.</p>
26235
26236       </div>
26237       <div class="tags">
26238
26239
26240         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>.
26241
26242
26243       </div>
26244     </div>
26245     <div class="padding"></div>
26246
26247     <div class="entry">
26248       <div class="title">
26249         <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>
26250       </div>
26251       <div class="date">
26252          3rd April 2011
26253       </div>
26254       <div class="body">
26255         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
26256 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
26257 update in English.</p>
26258
26259 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
26260 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
26261 of the British service
26262 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
26263 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
26264 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
26265 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
26266 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
26267 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
26268 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
26269 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
26270 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
26271 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
26272 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
26273 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
26274 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
26275
26276 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
26277 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
26278 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
26279 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
26280 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
26281 public infrastructure.</p>
26282
26283 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
26284 such service?</p>
26285
26286       </div>
26287       <div class="tags">
26288
26289
26290         Tags: <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>.
26291
26292
26293       </div>
26294     </div>
26295     <div class="padding"></div>
26296
26297     <div class="entry">
26298       <div class="title">
26299         <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>
26300       </div>
26301       <div class="date">
26302         28th January 2011
26303       </div>
26304       <div class="body">
26305         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
26306 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
26307 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
26308 available on the Internet, and check our locally
26309 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
26310 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
26311 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
26312 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
26313 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
26314 out which security holes were present in our free software
26315 collection.</p>
26316
26317 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
26318 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
26319 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
26320 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
26321 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
26322 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
26323 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
26324 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
26325 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
26326 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
26327 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
26328 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
26329 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
26330 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
26331 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
26332 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
26333
26334 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
26335 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
26336 check out, one could look up
26337 <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
26338 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
26339 The most recent one is
26340 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
26341 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
26342 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
26343
26344 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
26345 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
26346 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
26347 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
26348 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
26349 security issues out.</p>
26350
26351 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
26352 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
26353 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
26354 RHEL is providing
26355 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
26356 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
26357 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
26358
26359 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
26360 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
26361 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
26362 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
26363 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
26364 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
26365 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
26366 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
26367 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
26368 established soon.</p>
26369
26370 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
26371 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
26372 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
26373 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
26374 for their packages.</p>
26375
26376       </div>
26377       <div class="tags">
26378
26379
26380         Tags: <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>.
26381
26382
26383       </div>
26384     </div>
26385     <div class="padding"></div>
26386
26387     <div class="entry">
26388       <div class="title">
26389         <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>
26390       </div>
26391       <div class="date">
26392         23rd January 2011
26393       </div>
26394       <div class="body">
26395         <p>In the
26396 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
26397 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
26398 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
26399 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
26400 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
26401 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
26402 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
26403 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
26404 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
26405 one of my machines like this:</p>
26406
26407 <pre>
26408 loaded modules:
26409 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
26410 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
26411 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
26412 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
26413 10de:03ec pata_amd
26414 10de:03f6 sata_nv
26415 1022:1103 k8temp
26416 109e:036e bttv
26417 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
26418 11ab:4364 sky2
26419 </pre>
26420
26421 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
26422 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
26423
26424 <pre>
26425 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
26426     echo loaded pci modules:
26427     (
26428         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
26429         for address in * ; do
26430             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
26431                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
26432                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
26433                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
26434                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
26435                     echo "$id $module"
26436                 fi
26437             fi
26438         done
26439     )
26440     echo
26441 fi
26442 </pre>
26443
26444 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
26445 mappings:</p>
26446
26447 <pre>
26448 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
26449     echo loaded usb modules:
26450     (
26451         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
26452         for address in * ; do
26453             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
26454                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
26455                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
26456                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
26457                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
26458                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
26459                         echo "$id $module"
26460                     fi
26461                 fi
26462             fi
26463         done
26464     )
26465     echo
26466 fi
26467 </pre>
26468
26469 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
26470 well.</p>
26471
26472       </div>
26473       <div class="tags">
26474
26475
26476         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
26477
26478
26479       </div>
26480     </div>
26481     <div class="padding"></div>
26482
26483     <div class="entry">
26484       <div class="title">
26485         <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>
26486       </div>
26487       <div class="date">
26488         16th January 2011
26489       </div>
26490       <div class="body">
26491         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
26492 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
26493 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
26494 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
26495 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
26496 the Wikipedia article on
26497 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
26498 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
26499 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
26500 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
26501 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
26502 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
26503 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
26504 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
26505 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
26506 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
26507 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
26508 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
26509
26510 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
26511 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
26512 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
26513 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
26514 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
26515 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
26516 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
26517 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
26518 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
26519 from last week</a>.</p>
26520
26521 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
26522 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
26523 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
26524 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
26525 was without royalties and license terms, check out
26526 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
26527 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
26528
26529 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
26530 available from
26531 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
26532 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
26533 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
26534
26535 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
26536 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
26537 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
26538 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
26539
26540       </div>
26541       <div class="tags">
26542
26543
26544         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>.
26545
26546
26547       </div>
26548     </div>
26549     <div class="padding"></div>
26550
26551     <div class="entry">
26552       <div class="title">
26553         <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>
26554       </div>
26555       <div class="date">
26556         12th January 2011
26557       </div>
26558       <div class="body">
26559         <p>Today I discovered
26560 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
26561 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
26562 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
26563 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
26564 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
26565 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
26566 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
26567 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
26568 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
26569 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
26570 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
26571 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
26572 on the Google announcement is available from
26573 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
26574 A good read. :)</p>
26575
26576 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
26577 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
26578 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
26579 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
26580 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
26581 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
26582 browsers support H.264, and others support
26583 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
26584 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
26585 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
26586 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
26587 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
26588 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
26589 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
26590 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
26591
26592 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
26593 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
26594 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
26595 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
26596 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
26597 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
26598 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
26599
26600 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
26601 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
26602 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
26603 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
26604 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
26605 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
26606 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
26607
26608 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
26609 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
26610 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
26611 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
26612 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
26613 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
26614 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
26615
26616 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
26617 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
26618 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
26619 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
26620 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
26621 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
26622 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
26623 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
26624 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
26625 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
26626 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
26627 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
26628 I guess time will tell.</p>
26629
26630 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
26631 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
26632 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
26633
26634       </div>
26635       <div class="tags">
26636
26637
26638         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>.
26639
26640
26641       </div>
26642     </div>
26643     <div class="padding"></div>
26644
26645     <div class="entry">
26646       <div class="title">
26647         <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>
26648       </div>
26649       <div class="date">
26650         30th December 2010
26651       </div>
26652       <div class="body">
26653         <p>After trying to
26654 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
26655 Ogg Theora</a> to
26656 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
26657 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
26658 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
26659 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
26660 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
26661 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
26662 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
26663
26664 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
26665 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
26666 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
26667 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
26668 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
26669 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
26670 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
26671
26672 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
26673 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
26674
26675       </div>
26676       <div class="tags">
26677
26678
26679         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>.
26680
26681
26682       </div>
26683     </div>
26684     <div class="padding"></div>
26685
26686     <div class="entry">
26687       <div class="title">
26688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
26689       </div>
26690       <div class="date">
26691         27th December 2010
26692       </div>
26693       <div class="body">
26694         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
26695 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
26696 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
26697 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
26698 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
26699 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
26700 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
26701 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
26702
26703 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
26704 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
26705 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
26706 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
26707 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
26708 page</a>.</p>
26709
26710 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
26711 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
26712 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
26713 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
26714 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
26715 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
26716 specification on equal terms.</p>
26717
26718 <blockquote>
26719
26720 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
26721 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
26722 open standard:</p>
26723
26724 <ul>
26725
26726 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
26727 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
26728 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
26729 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
26730
26731 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
26732 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
26733 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
26734 nominal fee.</li>
26735
26736 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
26737 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
26738 free basis.</li>
26739
26740 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
26741
26742 </ul>
26743 </blockquote>
26744
26745 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
26746 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
26747 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
26748 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
26749 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
26750 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
26751 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
26752
26753 <blockquote>
26754
26755 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
26756
26757 <ol>
26758
26759 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
26760 tilgængelig.</li>
26761
26762 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
26763 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
26764
26765 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
26766 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
26767
26768 </ol>
26769
26770 </blockquote>
26771
26772 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
26773 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
26774
26775 <blockquote>
26776
26777 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
26778
26779 <ol>
26780
26781 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
26782 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
26783
26784 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
26785 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
26786 Standard themselves;</li>
26787
26788 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
26789 any party or in any business model;</li>
26790
26791 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
26792 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
26793 parties;</li>
26794
26795 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
26796 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
26797 parties.</li>
26798
26799 </ol>
26800
26801 </blockquote>
26802
26803 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
26804 its
26805 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
26806 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
26807
26808 <blockquote>
26809 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
26810
26811 <ul>
26812
26813 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
26814   democratic:
26815
26816          <ul>
26817
26818          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
26819             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
26820             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
26821             and managed.</li>
26822
26823          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
26824             method, can be changed through input from all
26825             participants.</li>
26826
26827          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
26828             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
26829
26830          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
26831             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
26832
26833          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
26834             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
26835             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
26836
26837          </ul>
26838
26839 </li>
26840
26841 </ul>
26842
26843 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
26844 <ul>
26845
26846 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
26847   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
26848   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
26849   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
26850   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
26851
26852 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
26853   a technical or economic barriers</li>
26854
26855 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
26856   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
26857   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
26858   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
26859   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
26860   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
26861   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
26862   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
26863   intended to function.</li>
26864
26865 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
26866   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
26867   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
26868
26869 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
26870   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
26871   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
26872   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
26873   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
26874   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
26875   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
26876   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
26877
26878       <ul>
26879
26880       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
26881         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
26882         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
26883
26884       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
26885         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
26886         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
26887         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
26888
26889       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
26890         licensor</li>
26891
26892       </ul>
26893 </li>
26894
26895 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
26896   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
26897   or restricted licensing terms</li>
26898
26899 </ul>
26900
26901 </blockquote>
26902
26903 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
26904 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
26905 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
26906 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
26907 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
26908 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
26909 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
26910 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
26911 Standards.</p>
26912
26913       </div>
26914       <div class="tags">
26915
26916
26917         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>.
26918
26919
26920       </div>
26921     </div>
26922     <div class="padding"></div>
26923
26924     <div class="entry">
26925       <div class="title">
26926         <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>
26927       </div>
26928       <div class="date">
26929         25th December 2010
26930       </div>
26931       <div class="body">
26932         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
26933 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
26934
26935 <blockquote>
26936
26937 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
26938 as follows:</p>
26939
26940 <ol>
26941
26942 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
26943 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
26944 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
26945
26946 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
26947 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
26948 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
26949 parties.</li>
26950
26951 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
26952 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
26953 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
26954
26955 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
26956 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
26957
26958 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
26959
26960 </ol>
26961
26962 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
26963 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
26964 products based on the standard.</p>
26965 </blockquote>
26966
26967 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
26968 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
26969 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
26970 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
26971 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
26972 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
26973 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
26974 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
26975
26976 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
26977
26978 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
26979 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
26980 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
26981 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
26982 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
26983 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
26984 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
26985 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
26986 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
26987 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
26988 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
26989 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
26990 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
26991 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
26992
26993 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
26994
26995 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
26996 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
26997 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
26998 documentation indicating this.</p>
26999
27000 <p>According to
27001 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
27002 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
27003 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
27004 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
27005 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
27006 report is correct.</p>
27007
27008 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
27009
27010 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
27011 container format</a> and both the
27012 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
27013 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
27014 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
27015
27016 <blockquote>
27017
27018 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
27019 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
27020 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
27021 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
27022 specification compliance.
27023
27024 </blockquote>
27025
27026 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
27027 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
27028 this is the term:<p>
27029
27030 <blockquote>
27031
27032 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
27033 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
27034 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
27035 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
27036 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
27037 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
27038 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
27039 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
27040 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
27041 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
27042 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
27043 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
27044
27045 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
27046 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
27047 </blockquote>
27048
27049 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
27050 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
27051 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
27052 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
27053 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
27054
27055 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
27056
27057 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
27058 Theora format.
27059 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
27060 and
27061 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
27062 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
27063 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
27064 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
27065 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
27066 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
27067 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
27068 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
27069
27070 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
27071
27072 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
27073
27074 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
27075
27076 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
27077 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
27078 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
27079 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
27080 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
27081 this.</p>
27082
27083 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
27084 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
27085
27086       </div>
27087       <div class="tags">
27088
27089
27090         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>.
27091
27092
27093       </div>
27094     </div>
27095     <div class="padding"></div>
27096
27097     <div class="entry">
27098       <div class="title">
27099         <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>
27100       </div>
27101       <div class="date">
27102         25th December 2010
27103       </div>
27104       <div class="body">
27105         <p>A few days ago
27106 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
27107 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
27108 2.0 of
27109 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
27110 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
27111 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
27112 Nothing very surprising there, given
27113 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
27114 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
27115 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
27116 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
27117 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
27118 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
27119 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
27120 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
27121 standard definition from its content.</p>
27122
27123 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
27124 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
27125 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
27126 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
27127 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
27128 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
27129 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
27130 background information about that story is available in
27131 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
27132 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
27133
27134 <blockquote>
27135 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
27136 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
27137 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
27138
27139 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
27140
27141 <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>
27142
27143 <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>
27144
27145 <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>
27146
27147 <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>
27148
27149 <p>
27150 <ul>
27151 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
27152 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
27153 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
27154 </ul>
27155 </p>
27156
27157 <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>
27158
27159 <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>
27160
27161 <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>
27162
27163 <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>
27164
27165 <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>
27166
27167
27168 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
27169 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
27170 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
27171 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
27172 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
27173 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
27174
27175 </p>
27176
27177 <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>
27178
27179 <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>
27180
27181 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
27182
27183 <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>
27184
27185 <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>
27186
27187 <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>
27188
27189 <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>
27190
27191 <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>
27192
27193 <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>
27194
27195 <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>
27196
27197 <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>
27198
27199 <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>
27200
27201 <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>
27202
27203 <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>
27204
27205 <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>
27206
27207 <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>
27208
27209 <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>
27210
27211 <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>
27212
27213 <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>
27214
27215 <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>
27216
27217 <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>
27218
27219 <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>
27220
27221 <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>
27222
27223 <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>
27224
27225 <p>On security:</p>
27226
27227 <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>
27228
27229 <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>
27230
27231 <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>
27232
27233 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
27234
27235 <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>
27236
27237 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
27238
27239 <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>
27240
27241 <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>
27242
27243 <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>
27244
27245 <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>
27246
27247 <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>
27248
27249 <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>
27250
27251 <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>
27252
27253 <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>
27254
27255 <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>
27256
27257 <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>
27258
27259 <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>
27260
27261 <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>
27262
27263 <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>
27264
27265 <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>
27266
27267 <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>
27268
27269 <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>
27270
27271 <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>
27272
27273 <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>
27274
27275 <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>
27276
27277 <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>
27278
27279 <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>
27280
27281 <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>
27282
27283 <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>
27284
27285 <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>
27286
27287 <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>
27288
27289 <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>
27290
27291 <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>
27292
27293 <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>
27294
27295 <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>
27296
27297 <p>Cordially,<br>
27298 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
27299 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
27300 </blockquote>
27301
27302       </div>
27303       <div class="tags">
27304
27305
27306         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>.
27307
27308
27309       </div>
27310     </div>
27311     <div class="padding"></div>
27312
27313     <div class="entry">
27314       <div class="title">
27315         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
27316       </div>
27317       <div class="date">
27318         25th December 2010
27319       </div>
27320       <div class="body">
27321         <p>Half a year ago I
27322 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
27323 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
27324 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
27325 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
27326
27327 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
27328 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
27329 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
27330 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
27331 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
27332 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
27333 got such a great test tool available.</p>
27334
27335       </div>
27336       <div class="tags">
27337
27338
27339         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>.
27340
27341
27342       </div>
27343     </div>
27344     <div class="padding"></div>
27345
27346     <div class="entry">
27347       <div class="title">
27348         <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>
27349       </div>
27350       <div class="date">
27351         22nd December 2010
27352       </div>
27353       <div class="body">
27354         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
27355 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
27356 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
27357 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
27358 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
27359 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
27360 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
27361 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
27362 university.</p>
27363
27364 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
27365 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
27366 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
27367 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
27368 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
27369 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
27370 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
27371 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
27372
27373 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
27374 I perform on a new model.</p>
27375
27376 <ul>
27377
27378 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
27379 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
27380 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
27381
27382 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
27383 installation, X.org is working.</li>
27384
27385 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
27386 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
27387 reported by the program.</li>
27388
27389 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
27390 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
27391 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
27392 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
27393 normally test this by playing
27394 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
27395 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
27396
27397 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
27398 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
27399
27400 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
27401 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
27402
27403 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
27404 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
27405
27406 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
27407 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
27408 few.</li>
27409
27410 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
27411 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
27412 notice this.</li>
27413
27414 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
27415 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
27416 resume.</li>
27417
27418 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
27419 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
27420 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
27421 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
27422 not.</li>
27423
27424 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
27425 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
27426 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
27427 existence.</li>
27428
27429 </ul>
27430
27431 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
27432 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
27433 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
27434 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
27435 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
27436 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
27437 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
27438 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
27439
27440       </div>
27441       <div class="tags">
27442
27443
27444         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>.
27445
27446
27447       </div>
27448     </div>
27449     <div class="padding"></div>
27450
27451     <div class="entry">
27452       <div class="title">
27453         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
27454       </div>
27455       <div class="date">
27456         11th December 2010
27457       </div>
27458       <div class="body">
27459         <p>As I continue to explore
27460 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
27461 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
27462 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
27463
27464 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
27465 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
27466 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
27467 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
27468 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
27469 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
27470 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
27471 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
27472 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
27473 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
27474 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
27475 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
27476 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
27477 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
27478 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
27479 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
27480 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
27481 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
27482 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
27483 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
27484
27485 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
27486 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
27487 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
27488 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
27489 If the Skolelinux foundation
27490 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
27491 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
27492 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
27493 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
27494 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
27495 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
27496 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
27497 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
27498
27499 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
27500 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
27501 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
27502 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
27503 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
27504 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
27505 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
27506 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
27507 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
27508 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
27509 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
27510 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
27511 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
27512 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
27513 currencies.</p>
27514
27515 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
27516 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
27517 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
27518 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
27519 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
27520 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
27521 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
27522 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
27523 BitCoins.  Check out
27524 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
27525 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
27526 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
27527 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
27528 yet.</p>
27529
27530 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
27531 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
27532 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
27533 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
27534 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
27535
27536       </div>
27537       <div class="tags">
27538
27539
27540         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>.
27541
27542
27543       </div>
27544     </div>
27545     <div class="padding"></div>
27546
27547     <div class="entry">
27548       <div class="title">
27549         <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>
27550       </div>
27551       <div class="date">
27552         10th December 2010
27553       </div>
27554       <div class="body">
27555         <p>With this weeks lawless
27556 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
27557 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
27558 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
27559 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
27560 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
27561 A blog post from
27562 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
27563 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
27564 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
27565 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
27566 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
27567 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
27568 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
27569
27570 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
27571 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
27572 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
27573 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
27574 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
27575 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
27576 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
27577 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
27578 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
27579 Debian</a> soon.</p>
27580
27581 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
27582 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
27583 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
27584 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
27585 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
27586 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
27587 you can even get
27588 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
27589 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
27590 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
27591 on the current exchange rates.</p>
27592
27593 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
27594 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
27595 donations to the address
27596 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
27597
27598       </div>
27599       <div class="tags">
27600
27601
27602         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>.
27603
27604
27605       </div>
27606     </div>
27607     <div class="padding"></div>
27608
27609     <div class="entry">
27610       <div class="title">
27611         <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>
27612       </div>
27613       <div class="date">
27614          9th December 2010
27615       </div>
27616       <div class="body">
27617         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
27618 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
27619 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
27620 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
27621 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
27622 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
27623 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
27624 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
27625 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
27626 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
27627 operational.</p>
27628
27629 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
27630 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
27631 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
27632 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
27633 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
27634 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
27635 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
27636
27637       </div>
27638       <div class="tags">
27639
27640
27641         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>.
27642
27643
27644       </div>
27645     </div>
27646     <div class="padding"></div>
27647
27648     <div class="entry">
27649       <div class="title">
27650         <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>
27651       </div>
27652       <div class="date">
27653         29th November 2010
27654       </div>
27655       <div class="body">
27656         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
27657 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
27658 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
27659 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
27660 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
27661 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
27662
27663 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
27664 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
27665 will hold its
27666 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
27667 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
27668 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
27669 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
27670 vote this year.</p>
27671
27672       </div>
27673       <div class="tags">
27674
27675
27676         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
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/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
27686       </div>
27687       <div class="date">
27688         27th November 2010
27689       </div>
27690       <div class="body">
27691         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
27692 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
27693 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
27694 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
27695 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
27696 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
27697 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
27698 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
27699
27700 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
27701 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
27702 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
27703 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
27704 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
27705 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
27706 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
27707 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
27708 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
27709 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
27710 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
27711
27712 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
27713 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
27714 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
27715 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
27716 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
27717 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
27718 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
27719 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
27720 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
27721 what is going on.</p>
27722
27723       </div>
27724       <div class="tags">
27725
27726
27727         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>.
27728
27729
27730       </div>
27731     </div>
27732     <div class="padding"></div>
27733
27734     <div class="entry">
27735       <div class="title">
27736         <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>
27737       </div>
27738       <div class="date">
27739         22nd November 2010
27740       </div>
27741       <div class="body">
27742         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
27743 upgrade testing of the
27744 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
27745 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
27746 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
27747 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
27748
27749 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
27750
27751 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27752
27753 <blockquote><p>
27754   apache2.2-bin
27755   aptdaemon
27756   baobab
27757   binfmt-support
27758   browser-plugin-gnash
27759   cheese-common
27760   cli-common
27761   cups-pk-helper
27762   dmz-cursor-theme
27763   empathy
27764   empathy-common
27765   freedesktop-sound-theme
27766   freeglut3
27767   gconf-defaults-service
27768   gdm-themes
27769   gedit-plugins
27770   geoclue
27771   geoclue-hostip
27772   geoclue-localnet
27773   geoclue-manual
27774   geoclue-yahoo
27775   gnash
27776   gnash-common
27777   gnome
27778   gnome-backgrounds
27779   gnome-cards-data
27780   gnome-codec-install
27781   gnome-core
27782   gnome-desktop-environment
27783   gnome-disk-utility
27784   gnome-screenshot
27785   gnome-search-tool
27786   gnome-session-canberra
27787   gnome-system-log
27788   gnome-themes-extras
27789   gnome-themes-more
27790   gnome-user-share
27791   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
27792   gstreamer0.10-tools
27793   gtk2-engines
27794   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
27795   gtk2-engines-smooth
27796   hamster-applet
27797   libapache2-mod-dnssd
27798   libapr1
27799   libaprutil1
27800   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
27801   libaprutil1-ldap
27802   libart2.0-cil
27803   libboost-date-time1.42.0
27804   libboost-python1.42.0
27805   libboost-thread1.42.0
27806   libchamplain-0.4-0
27807   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
27808   libcheese-gtk18
27809   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
27810   libcryptui0
27811   libdiscid0
27812   libelf1
27813   libepc-1.0-2
27814   libepc-common
27815   libepc-ui-1.0-2
27816   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
27817   libfreerdp0
27818   libgconf2.0-cil
27819   libgdata-common
27820   libgdata7
27821   libgdu-gtk0
27822   libgee2
27823   libgeoclue0
27824   libgexiv2-0
27825   libgif4
27826   libglade2.0-cil
27827   libglib2.0-cil
27828   libgmime2.4-cil
27829   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
27830   libgnome2.24-cil
27831   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
27832   libgpod-common
27833   libgpod4
27834   libgtk2.0-cil
27835   libgtkglext1
27836   libgtksourceview2.0-common
27837   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
27838   libmono-addins0.2-cil
27839   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
27840   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
27841   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
27842   libmono-posix2.0-cil
27843   libmono-security2.0-cil
27844   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
27845   libmono-system2.0-cil
27846   libmtp8
27847   libmusicbrainz3-6
27848   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
27849   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
27850   libopal3.6.8
27851   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
27852   libpt2.6.7
27853   libpython2.6
27854   librpm1
27855   librpmio1
27856   libsdl1.2debian
27857   libsrtp0
27858   libssh-4
27859   libtelepathy-farsight0
27860   libtelepathy-glib0
27861   libtidy-0.99-0
27862   media-player-info
27863   mesa-utils
27864   mono-2.0-gac
27865   mono-gac
27866   mono-runtime
27867   nautilus-sendto
27868   nautilus-sendto-empathy
27869   p7zip-full
27870   pkg-config
27871   python-aptdaemon
27872   python-aptdaemon-gtk
27873   python-axiom
27874   python-beautifulsoup
27875   python-bugbuddy
27876   python-clientform
27877   python-coherence
27878   python-configobj
27879   python-crypto
27880   python-cupshelpers
27881   python-elementtree
27882   python-epsilon
27883   python-evolution
27884   python-feedparser
27885   python-gdata
27886   python-gdbm
27887   python-gst0.10
27888   python-gtkglext1
27889   python-gtksourceview2
27890   python-httplib2
27891   python-louie
27892   python-mako
27893   python-markupsafe
27894   python-mechanize
27895   python-nevow
27896   python-notify
27897   python-opengl
27898   python-openssl
27899   python-pam
27900   python-pkg-resources
27901   python-pyasn1
27902   python-pysqlite2
27903   python-rdflib
27904   python-serial
27905   python-tagpy
27906   python-twisted-bin
27907   python-twisted-conch
27908   python-twisted-core
27909   python-twisted-web
27910   python-utidylib
27911   python-webkit
27912   python-xdg
27913   python-zope.interface
27914   remmina
27915   remmina-plugin-data
27916   remmina-plugin-rdp
27917   remmina-plugin-vnc
27918   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
27919   rhythmbox-plugins
27920   rpm-common
27921   rpm2cpio
27922   seahorse-plugins
27923   shotwell
27924   software-center
27925   system-config-printer-udev
27926   telepathy-gabble
27927   telepathy-mission-control-5
27928   telepathy-salut
27929   tomboy
27930   totem
27931   totem-coherence
27932   totem-mozilla
27933   totem-plugins
27934   transmission-common
27935   xdg-user-dirs
27936   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
27937   xserver-xephyr
27938 </p></blockquote>
27939
27940 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
27941
27942 <blockquote><p>
27943   cheese
27944   ekiga
27945   eog
27946   epiphany-extensions
27947   evolution-exchange
27948   fast-user-switch-applet
27949   file-roller
27950   gcalctool
27951   gconf-editor
27952   gdm
27953   gedit
27954   gedit-common
27955   gnome-games
27956   gnome-games-data
27957   gnome-nettool
27958   gnome-system-tools
27959   gnome-themes
27960   gnuchess
27961   gucharmap
27962   guile-1.8-libs
27963   libavahi-ui0
27964   libdmx1
27965   libgalago3
27966   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
27967   libgtksourceview2.0-0
27968   liblircclient0
27969   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
27970   libspeexdsp1
27971   libsvga1
27972   rhythmbox
27973   seahorse
27974   sound-juicer
27975   system-config-printer
27976   totem-common
27977   transmission-gtk
27978   vinagre
27979   vino
27980 </p></blockquote>
27981
27982 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27983
27984 <blockquote><p>
27985   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
27986 </p></blockquote>
27987
27988 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27989
27990 <blockquote><p>
27991 [nothing]
27992 </p></blockquote>
27993
27994 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
27995
27996 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27997
27998 <blockquote><p>
27999   ksmserver
28000 </p></blockquote>
28001
28002 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
28003
28004 <blockquote><p>
28005   kwin
28006   network-manager-kde
28007 </p></blockquote>
28008
28009 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
28010
28011 <blockquote><p>
28012   arts
28013   dolphin
28014   freespacenotifier
28015   google-gadgets-gst
28016   google-gadgets-xul
28017   kappfinder
28018   kcalc
28019   kcharselect
28020   kde-core
28021   kde-plasma-desktop
28022   kde-standard
28023   kde-window-manager
28024   kdeartwork
28025   kdeartwork-emoticons
28026   kdeartwork-style
28027   kdeartwork-theme-icon
28028   kdebase
28029   kdebase-apps
28030   kdebase-workspace
28031   kdebase-workspace-bin
28032   kdebase-workspace-data
28033   kdeeject
28034   kdelibs
28035   kdeplasma-addons
28036   kdeutils
28037   kdewallpapers
28038   kdf
28039   kfloppy
28040   kgpg
28041   khelpcenter4
28042   kinfocenter
28043   konq-plugins-l10n
28044   konqueror-nsplugins
28045   kscreensaver
28046   kscreensaver-xsavers
28047   ktimer
28048   kwrite
28049   libgle3
28050   libkde4-ruby1.8
28051   libkonq5
28052   libkonq5-templates
28053   libnetpbm10
28054   libplasma-ruby
28055   libplasma-ruby1.8
28056   libqt4-ruby1.8
28057   marble-data
28058   marble-plugins
28059   netpbm
28060   nuvola-icon-theme
28061   plasma-dataengines-workspace
28062   plasma-desktop
28063   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
28064   plasma-runners-addons
28065   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
28066   plasma-scriptengine-python
28067   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
28068   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
28069   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
28070   plasma-scriptengines
28071   plasma-wallpapers-addons
28072   plasma-widget-folderview
28073   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
28074   ruby
28075   sweeper
28076   update-notifier-kde
28077   xscreensaver-data-extra
28078   xscreensaver-gl
28079   xscreensaver-gl-extra
28080   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
28081 </p></blockquote>
28082
28083 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
28084
28085 <blockquote><p>
28086   ark
28087   google-gadgets-common
28088   google-gadgets-qt
28089   htdig
28090   kate
28091   kdebase-bin
28092   kdebase-data
28093   kdepasswd
28094   kfind
28095   klipper
28096   konq-plugins
28097   konqueror
28098   ksysguard
28099   ksysguardd
28100   libarchive1
28101   libcln6
28102   libeet1
28103   libeina-svn-06
28104   libggadget-1.0-0b
28105   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
28106   libgps19
28107   libkdecorations4
28108   libkephal4
28109   libkonq4
28110   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
28111   libkscreensaver5
28112   libksgrd4
28113   libksignalplotter4
28114   libkunitconversion4
28115   libkwineffects1a
28116   libmarblewidget4
28117   libntrack-qt4-1
28118   libntrack0
28119   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
28120   libplasmaclock4a
28121   libplasmagenericshell4
28122   libprocesscore4a
28123   libprocessui4a
28124   libqalculate5
28125   libqedje0a
28126   libqtruby4shared2
28127   libqzion0a
28128   libruby1.8
28129   libscim8c2a
28130   libsmokekdecore4-3
28131   libsmokekdeui4-3
28132   libsmokekfile3
28133   libsmokekhtml3
28134   libsmokekio3
28135   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
28136   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
28137   libsmokekparts3
28138   libsmokektexteditor3
28139   libsmokekutils3
28140   libsmokenepomuk3
28141   libsmokephonon3
28142   libsmokeplasma3
28143   libsmokeqtcore4-3
28144   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
28145   libsmokeqtgui4-3
28146   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
28147   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
28148   libsmokeqtscript4-3
28149   libsmokeqtsql4-3
28150   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
28151   libsmokeqttest4-3
28152   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
28153   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
28154   libsmokeqtxml4-3
28155   libsmokesolid3
28156   libsmokesoprano3
28157   libtaskmanager4a
28158   libtidy-0.99-0
28159   libweather-ion4a
28160   libxklavier16
28161   libxxf86misc1
28162   okteta
28163   oxygencursors
28164   plasma-dataengines-addons
28165   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
28166   plasma-widget-lancelot
28167   plasma-widgets-addons
28168   plasma-widgets-workspace
28169   polkit-kde-1
28170   ruby1.8
28171   systemsettings
28172   update-notifier-common
28173 </p></blockquote>
28174
28175 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
28176 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
28177 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
28178 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
28179
28180       </div>
28181       <div class="tags">
28182
28183
28184         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>.
28185
28186
28187       </div>
28188     </div>
28189     <div class="padding"></div>
28190
28191     <div class="entry">
28192       <div class="title">
28193         <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>
28194       </div>
28195       <div class="date">
28196         22nd November 2010
28197       </div>
28198       <div class="body">
28199         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
28200 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
28201 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
28202 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
28203 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
28204 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
28205 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
28206 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
28207 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
28208
28209 <p>I found
28210 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
28211 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
28212 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
28213 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
28214 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
28215 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
28216
28217 <pre>
28218 #!/bin/sh
28219
28220 # Based on
28221 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
28222
28223 set -e
28224 set -x
28225
28226 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
28227     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
28228     exit 1
28229 else
28230     host="$1"
28231 fi
28232
28233 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
28234     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
28235     exit 1
28236 fi
28237
28238 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
28239 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
28240 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
28241 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
28242
28243 img=$host.img
28244 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
28245 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
28246
28247 parted $img mklabel msdos
28248 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
28249 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
28250 parted $img set 1 boot on
28251
28252 modprobe dm-mod
28253 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
28254 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
28255
28256 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
28257 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
28258 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
28259
28260 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
28261 losetup -d /dev/loop0
28262 </pre>
28263
28264 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
28265 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
28266
28267 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
28268 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
28269 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
28270 seem to work just fine.</p>
28271
28272       </div>
28273       <div class="tags">
28274
28275
28276         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>.
28277
28278
28279       </div>
28280     </div>
28281     <div class="padding"></div>
28282
28283     <div class="entry">
28284       <div class="title">
28285         <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>
28286       </div>
28287       <div class="date">
28288         20th November 2010
28289       </div>
28290       <div class="body">
28291         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
28292 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
28293 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
28294 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
28295
28296 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
28297 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
28298 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
28299
28300 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
28301
28302 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
28303
28304 <blockquote><p>
28305   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
28306   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
28307   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
28308   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
28309   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
28310   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
28311   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
28312   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
28313   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
28314   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
28315   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
28316   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
28317   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
28318   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
28319   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
28320   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
28321   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
28322   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
28323   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
28324   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
28325   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
28326   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
28327   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
28328   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
28329   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
28330   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
28331   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
28332   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
28333   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
28334   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
28335   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
28336   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
28337   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
28338   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
28339   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
28340   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
28341   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
28342   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
28343   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
28344   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
28345   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
28346   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
28347   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
28348   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
28349   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
28350   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
28351   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
28352   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
28353   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
28354   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
28355   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
28356   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
28357   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
28358   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
28359   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
28360   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
28361   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
28362   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
28363   zip
28364 </p></blockquote>
28365
28366 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
28367
28368 <blockquote><p>
28369   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
28370   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
28371   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
28372   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
28373   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
28374   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
28375   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
28376   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
28377   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
28378   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
28379   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
28380   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
28381   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
28382   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
28383   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
28384   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
28385   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
28386   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
28387   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
28388   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
28389   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
28390   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
28391   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
28392   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
28393   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
28394   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
28395   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
28396   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
28397   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
28398 </p></blockquote>
28399
28400 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
28401
28402 <blockquote><p>
28403   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
28404 </p></blockquote>
28405
28406 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
28407
28408 <blockquote><p>
28409 [nothing]
28410 </p></blockquote>
28411
28412 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
28413
28414 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
28415
28416 <blockquote><p>
28417   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
28418   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
28419   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
28420   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
28421   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
28422   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
28423   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
28424   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
28425   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
28426   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
28427   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
28428   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
28429   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
28430   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
28431   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
28432   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
28433   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
28434   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
28435   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
28436   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
28437   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
28438   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
28439   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
28440   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
28441   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
28442   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
28443   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
28444   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
28445   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
28446   ttf-sazanami-gothic
28447 </p></blockquote>
28448
28449 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
28450
28451 <blockquote><p>
28452   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
28453   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
28454   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
28455   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
28456   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
28457   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
28458   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
28459   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
28460   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
28461   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
28462   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
28463   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
28464   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
28465   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
28466   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
28467   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
28468   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
28469   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
28470   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
28471   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
28472   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
28473   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
28474   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
28475   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
28476   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
28477   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
28478   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
28479   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
28480   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
28481   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
28482   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
28483   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
28484   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
28485 </p></blockquote>
28486
28487 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
28488
28489 <blockquote><p>
28490   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
28491   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
28492   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
28493   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
28494   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
28495   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
28496   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
28497 </p></blockquote>
28498
28499 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
28500
28501 <blockquote><p>
28502   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
28503 </p></blockquote>
28504
28505       </div>
28506       <div class="tags">
28507
28508
28509         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>.
28510
28511
28512       </div>
28513     </div>
28514     <div class="padding"></div>
28515
28516     <div class="entry">
28517       <div class="title">
28518         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
28519       </div>
28520       <div class="date">
28521         20th November 2010
28522       </div>
28523       <div class="body">
28524         <p>Answering
28525 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
28526 call from the Gnash project</a> for
28527 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
28528 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
28529 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
28530 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
28531 releases out more often.</p>
28532
28533 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
28534 I have considered setting up a <a
28535 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
28536 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
28537 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
28538 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
28539 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
28540 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
28541 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
28542 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
28543 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
28544 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
28545 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
28546 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
28547
28548       </div>
28549       <div class="tags">
28550
28551
28552         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>.
28553
28554
28555       </div>
28556     </div>
28557     <div class="padding"></div>
28558
28559     <div class="entry">
28560       <div class="title">
28561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
28562       </div>
28563       <div class="date">
28564          9th November 2010
28565       </div>
28566       <div class="body">
28567         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
28568
28569 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
28570 3D linked in from
28571 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
28572 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
28573
28574       </div>
28575       <div class="tags">
28576
28577
28578         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>.
28579
28580
28581       </div>
28582     </div>
28583     <div class="padding"></div>
28584
28585     <div class="entry">
28586       <div class="title">
28587         <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>
28588       </div>
28589       <div class="date">
28590          7th November 2010
28591       </div>
28592       <div class="body">
28593         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
28594 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
28595 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
28596 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
28597 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
28598 working using this DVD.</p>
28599
28600 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
28601 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
28602 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
28603 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
28604 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
28605 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
28606 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
28607
28608 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
28609 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
28610 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
28611 Debian archive.</p>
28612
28613 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
28614 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
28615 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
28616 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
28617 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
28618 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
28619 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
28620 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
28621 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
28622 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
28623 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
28624 free X driver should work.</p>
28625
28626 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
28627 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
28628 DVD more useful again.</p>
28629
28630       </div>
28631       <div class="tags">
28632
28633
28634         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28635
28636
28637       </div>
28638     </div>
28639     <div class="padding"></div>
28640
28641     <div class="entry">
28642       <div class="title">
28643         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
28644       </div>
28645       <div class="date">
28646         24th October 2010
28647       </div>
28648       <div class="body">
28649         <p>Some updates.</p>
28650
28651 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
28652 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
28653 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
28654 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
28655 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
28656 :)</p>
28657
28658 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
28659 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
28660 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
28661 It is called
28662 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
28663 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
28664 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
28665 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
28666 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
28667 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
28668
28669 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
28670 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
28671 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
28672 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
28673 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
28674 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
28675 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
28676 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
28677 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
28678 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
28679
28680       </div>
28681       <div class="tags">
28682
28683
28684         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>.
28685
28686
28687       </div>
28688     </div>
28689     <div class="padding"></div>
28690
28691     <div class="entry">
28692       <div class="title">
28693         <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>
28694       </div>
28695       <div class="date">
28696         19th October 2010
28697       </div>
28698       <div class="body">
28699         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
28700 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
28701 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
28702 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
28703 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
28704 AVM2 flash files.</p>
28705
28706 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
28707 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
28708 following text:</P>
28709
28710 <p><blockquote>
28711
28712   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
28713   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
28714
28715   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
28716
28717   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
28718
28719   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
28720   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
28721   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
28722   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
28723   days. The project web page is available from
28724   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
28725   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
28726   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
28727
28728   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
28729   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
28730   to get this to happen.</p>
28731
28732   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
28733   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
28734
28735 </blockquote></p>
28736
28737 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
28738 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
28739 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
28740 :)</p>
28741
28742       </div>
28743       <div class="tags">
28744
28745
28746         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>.
28747
28748
28749       </div>
28750     </div>
28751     <div class="padding"></div>
28752
28753     <div class="entry">
28754       <div class="title">
28755         <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>
28756       </div>
28757       <div class="date">
28758          9th October 2010
28759       </div>
28760       <div class="body">
28761         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
28762 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
28763 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
28764 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
28765 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
28766 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
28767 robots.</p>
28768
28769 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
28770 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
28771 a few less important features too.</p>
28772
28773 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
28774 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
28775 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
28776 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
28777
28778 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
28779 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
28780 source or binary package:</p>
28781
28782 <p><ul>
28783 <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>
28784 <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>
28785 <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>
28786 </ul></p>
28787
28788 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
28789 please let me know.</p>
28790
28791       </div>
28792       <div class="tags">
28793
28794
28795         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>.
28796
28797
28798       </div>
28799     </div>
28800     <div class="padding"></div>
28801
28802     <div class="entry">
28803       <div class="title">
28804         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
28805       </div>
28806       <div class="date">
28807          3rd October 2010
28808       </div>
28809       <div class="body">
28810         <p><ul>
28811
28812 <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
28813 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
28814
28815 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
28816 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
28817 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
28818
28819 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
28820 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
28821 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
28822 simple setup.
28823
28824 </ul></p>
28825
28826       </div>
28827       <div class="tags">
28828
28829
28830         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>.
28831
28832
28833       </div>
28834     </div>
28835     <div class="padding"></div>
28836
28837     <div class="entry">
28838       <div class="title">
28839         <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>
28840       </div>
28841       <div class="date">
28842          9th September 2010
28843       </div>
28844       <div class="body">
28845         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
28846 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
28847 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
28848 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
28849 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
28850 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
28851 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
28852 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
28853 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
28854
28855 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
28856 written:</p>
28857
28858 <blockquote>
28859 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
28860 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
28861 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
28862 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
28863 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
28864
28865 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
28866 standard.</p>
28867 </blockquote>
28868
28869 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
28870 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
28871 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
28872 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
28873
28874 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
28875 read
28876 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
28877 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
28878 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
28879 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
28880 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
28881 the issue.  The solution is to support the
28882 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
28883 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
28884 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
28885
28886       </div>
28887       <div class="tags">
28888
28889
28890         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>.
28891
28892
28893       </div>
28894     </div>
28895     <div class="padding"></div>
28896
28897     <div class="entry">
28898       <div class="title">
28899         <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>
28900       </div>
28901       <div class="date">
28902          4th September 2010
28903       </div>
28904       <div class="body">
28905         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
28906 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
28907 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
28908 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
28909 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
28910 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
28911 installed.</p>
28912
28913 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
28914 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
28915 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
28916 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
28917 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
28918 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
28919 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
28920 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
28921 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
28922
28923 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
28924 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
28925 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
28926 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
28927 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
28928 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
28929 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
28930 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
28931 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
28932 pages they want to visit.</p>
28933
28934 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
28935 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
28936 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
28937 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
28938 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
28939 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
28940 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
28941 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
28942 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
28943 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
28944 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
28945
28946       </div>
28947       <div class="tags">
28948
28949
28950         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>.
28951
28952
28953       </div>
28954     </div>
28955     <div class="padding"></div>
28956
28957     <div class="entry">
28958       <div class="title">
28959         <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>
28960       </div>
28961       <div class="date">
28962          1st September 2010
28963       </div>
28964       <div class="body">
28965         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
28966 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
28967 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
28968 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
28969 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
28970 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
28971 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
28972 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
28973 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
28974 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
28975 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
28976 drive around.</p>
28977
28978 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
28979 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
28980
28981 <p><pre>
28982 use Spykee;
28983 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
28984 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
28985 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
28986 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
28987 $spykee->left();
28988 sleep 2;
28989 $spykee->right();
28990 sleep 2;
28991 $spykee->forward();
28992 sleep 2;
28993 $spykee->back();
28994 sleep 2;
28995 $spykee->stop();
28996 </pre></p>
28997
28998 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
28999 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
29000 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
29001 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
29002 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
29003 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
29004 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
29005 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
29006 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
29007 going. :).</p>
29008
29009 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
29010 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
29011 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
29012 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
29013
29014       </div>
29015       <div class="tags">
29016
29017
29018         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>.
29019
29020
29021       </div>
29022     </div>
29023     <div class="padding"></div>
29024
29025     <div class="entry">
29026       <div class="title">
29027         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
29028       </div>
29029       <div class="date">
29030         30th August 2010
29031       </div>
29032       <div class="body">
29033         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
29034 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
29035 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
29036 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
29037 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
29038 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
29039 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
29040
29041 <pre>
29042 % ln foo bar
29043 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
29044 %
29045 </pre>
29046
29047 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
29048 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
29049 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
29050 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
29051 nevertheless. :)</p>
29052
29053 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
29054 git from
29055 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
29056
29057       </div>
29058       <div class="tags">
29059
29060
29061         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29062
29063
29064       </div>
29065     </div>
29066     <div class="padding"></div>
29067
29068     <div class="entry">
29069       <div class="title">
29070         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
29071       </div>
29072       <div class="date">
29073         26th August 2010
29074       </div>
29075       <div class="body">
29076         <p>My file system sematics program
29077 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
29078 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
29079 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
29080 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
29081 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
29082 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
29083 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
29084 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
29085 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
29086 script:</p>
29087
29088 <pre>
29089 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
29090   mode_t retval = 0;
29091   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
29092   if (-1 != fd) {
29093     unlink(name);
29094     struct stat statbuf;
29095     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
29096       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
29097     }
29098     close(fd);
29099   }
29100   return retval;
29101 }
29102
29103 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
29104 int test_umask(void) {
29105   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
29106
29107   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
29108   mode_t newmode;
29109   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
29110     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
29111            newmode);
29112   }
29113   umask(007);
29114   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
29115     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
29116            newmode);
29117   }
29118
29119   umask (orig_umask);
29120   return 0;
29121 }
29122
29123 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
29124   [...]
29125   test_umask();
29126   return 0;
29127 }
29128 </pre>
29129
29130 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
29131
29132 <pre>
29133 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
29134 info: testing symlink creation
29135 info: testing subdirectory creation
29136 info: testing fcntl locking
29137   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29138   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29139   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
29140   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29141   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29142   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
29143 info: testing umask effect on file creation
29144 </pre>
29145
29146 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
29147 result:</p>
29148
29149 <pre>
29150 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
29151 info: testing symlink creation
29152 info: testing subdirectory creation
29153 info: testing fcntl locking
29154   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29155   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29156   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
29157   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29158   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29159   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
29160 info: testing umask effect on file creation
29161   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
29162   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
29163 </pre>
29164
29165 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
29166 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
29167 directory.</p>
29168
29169 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
29170 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
29171
29172 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
29173 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
29174 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
29175
29176       </div>
29177       <div class="tags">
29178
29179
29180         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29181
29182
29183       </div>
29184     </div>
29185     <div class="padding"></div>
29186
29187     <div class="entry">
29188       <div class="title">
29189         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
29190       </div>
29191       <div class="date">
29192         15th August 2010
29193       </div>
29194       <div class="body">
29195         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
29196 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
29197 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
29198 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
29199 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
29200 long time.</p>
29201
29202       </div>
29203       <div class="tags">
29204
29205
29206         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>.
29207
29208
29209       </div>
29210     </div>
29211     <div class="padding"></div>
29212
29213     <div class="entry">
29214       <div class="title">
29215         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
29216       </div>
29217       <div class="date">
29218          9th August 2010
29219       </div>
29220       <div class="body">
29221         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
29222 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
29223 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
29224 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
29225 generated configuration.</p>
29226
29227 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
29228 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
29229 without any manual configuration.</p>
29230
29231 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
29232 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
29233 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
29234 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
29235 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
29236 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
29237 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
29238 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
29239 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
29240 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
29241 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
29242 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
29243 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
29244 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
29245 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
29246 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
29247 use.</p>
29248
29249 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
29250 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
29251 working properly out of the box:</p>
29252
29253 <ul>
29254 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
29255 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
29256 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
29257 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
29258 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
29259 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
29260 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
29261 </ul>
29262
29263 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
29264
29265 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
29266 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
29267 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
29268 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
29269 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
29270
29271 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
29272 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
29273 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
29274 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
29275 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
29276 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
29277 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
29278 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
29279
29280 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
29281 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
29282 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
29283 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
29284 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
29285 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
29286 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
29287 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
29288 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
29289 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
29290 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
29291 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
29292 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
29293 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
29294 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
29295 current DNS domain is used.</p>
29296
29297 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
29298 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
29299 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
29300 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
29301 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
29302 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
29303 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
29304 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
29305 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
29306 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
29307 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
29308 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
29309 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
29310
29311 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
29312 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
29313 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
29314 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
29315 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
29316 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
29317 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
29318 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
29319 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
29320 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
29321 do for now. :)</p>
29322
29323 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
29324 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
29325 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
29326 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
29327 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
29328 yet.</p>
29329
29330 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
29331 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29332
29333 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
29334 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
29335 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
29336 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
29337
29338       </div>
29339       <div class="tags">
29340
29341
29342         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29343
29344
29345       </div>
29346     </div>
29347     <div class="padding"></div>
29348
29349     <div class="entry">
29350       <div class="title">
29351         <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>
29352       </div>
29353       <div class="date">
29354          8th August 2010
29355       </div>
29356       <div class="body">
29357         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
29358 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
29359 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
29360 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
29361 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
29362 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
29363 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
29364
29365 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
29366 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
29367 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
29368 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
29369 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
29370 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
29371 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
29372
29373 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
29374 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
29375 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
29376 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
29377 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
29378
29379 <pre>
29380 /*
29381  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
29382  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
29383  * directory.
29384  * License: GPL v2 or later
29385  *
29386  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
29387  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
29388 */
29389
29390 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
29391 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
29392 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
29393
29394 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
29395
29396 #include &lt;errno.h>
29397 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
29398 #include &lt;stdio.h>
29399 #include &lt;string.h>
29400 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
29401 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
29402 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
29403 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
29404 #include &lt;unistd.h>
29405
29406 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
29407 /*
29408  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
29409  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
29410  * below.
29411  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
29412  */
29413 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
29414 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
29415   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
29416 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
29417   char *zErrMsg;
29418   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
29419   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
29420   unlink(name);
29421   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
29422   if( rc ){
29423     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
29424     sqlite3_close(db);
29425     return -1;
29426   }
29427
29428   /* create tables */
29429   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
29430   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
29431     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
29432     sqlite3_close(db);
29433     return -1;
29434   }
29435   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
29436   sqlite3_close(db);
29437   return 0;
29438 }
29439 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
29440
29441 /*
29442  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
29443  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
29444  * done in the sqlite3 library.
29445  * See also
29446  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
29447  * POSIX specification
29448  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
29449  */
29450 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
29451   struct flock fl;
29452   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
29453   unlink(name);
29454   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
29455   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
29456
29457   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
29458   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
29459   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
29460   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
29461   fl.l_len    = 1;
29462   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
29463   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29464
29465   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
29466   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
29467   fl.l_len    = 510;
29468   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
29469   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29470
29471   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
29472   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
29473   fl.l_len    = 1;
29474   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
29475   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29476
29477   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
29478   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
29479   fl.l_len    = 1;
29480   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
29481   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29482
29483   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
29484   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
29485   fl.l_len    = 510;
29486   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29487
29488   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
29489   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
29490   fl.l_len    = 2;
29491   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
29492   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
29493
29494   close(fd);
29495   return 0;
29496 }
29497
29498 /*
29499  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
29500  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
29501  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
29502  * slowing down file operations.
29503  */
29504 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
29505 #define LEVELS 5
29506   char *path = strdup("test");
29507   char *dirs[LEVELS];
29508   int level;
29509   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
29510   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
29511     char *newpath = NULL;
29512     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
29513       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
29514              path, strerror(errno));
29515       break;
29516     }
29517     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
29518     free(path);
29519     path = newpath;
29520   }
29521   return 0;
29522 }
29523
29524 /*
29525  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
29526  * KDE.
29527  */
29528 int test_symlinks(void) {
29529   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
29530   unlink("symlink");
29531   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
29532     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
29533   return 0;
29534 }
29535
29536 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
29537   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
29538   test_symlinks();
29539   test_subdirectory_creation();
29540 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
29541   test_sqlite_open();
29542 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
29543   test_gcompris_locking();
29544   return 0;
29545 }
29546 </pre>
29547
29548 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
29549 this:</p>
29550
29551 <pre>
29552 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
29553 info: testing symlink creation
29554 info: testing subdirectory creation
29555 info: sqlite worked
29556 info: testing fcntl locking
29557   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29558   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29559   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
29560   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
29561   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
29562   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
29563 </pre>
29564
29565 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
29566 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
29567 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
29568 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
29569 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
29570 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
29571 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
29572 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
29573
29574 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
29575 it. :)</p>
29576
29577 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
29578 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
29579 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
29580
29581       </div>
29582       <div class="tags">
29583
29584
29585         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29586
29587
29588       </div>
29589     </div>
29590     <div class="padding"></div>
29591
29592     <div class="entry">
29593       <div class="title">
29594         <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>
29595       </div>
29596       <div class="date">
29597          7th August 2010
29598       </div>
29599       <div class="body">
29600         <p>A few days ago, I
29601 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
29602 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
29603 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
29604 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
29605 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
29606 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
29607 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
29608 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
29609 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
29610
29611 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
29612 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
29613 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
29614 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
29615 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
29616 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
29617 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
29618 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
29619 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
29620 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
29621 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
29622 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
29623 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
29624 gave it a IP address.</p>
29625
29626 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
29627 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
29628 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
29629 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
29630 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
29631 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
29632 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
29633 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
29634
29635 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
29636 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
29637 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
29638 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
29639 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
29640 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
29641
29642 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
29643 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
29644 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
29645 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
29646 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
29647 with UID and GID values.</p>
29648
29649 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
29650 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29651
29652       </div>
29653       <div class="tags">
29654
29655
29656         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29657
29658
29659       </div>
29660     </div>
29661     <div class="padding"></div>
29662
29663     <div class="entry">
29664       <div class="title">
29665         <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>
29666       </div>
29667       <div class="date">
29668          3rd August 2010
29669       </div>
29670       <div class="body">
29671         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
29672 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
29673 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
29674 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
29675 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
29676 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
29677 servers.</p>
29678
29679 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
29680 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
29681 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
29682 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
29683 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
29684 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
29685 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
29686 .uio.no.</p>
29687
29688 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
29689 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
29690 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
29691 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
29692 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
29693 university servers.</p>
29694
29695 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
29696 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
29697 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
29698 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
29699 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
29700 uses.</p>
29701
29702       </div>
29703       <div class="tags">
29704
29705
29706         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29707
29708
29709       </div>
29710     </div>
29711     <div class="padding"></div>
29712
29713     <div class="entry">
29714       <div class="title">
29715         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
29716       </div>
29717       <div class="date">
29718         27th July 2010
29719       </div>
29720       <div class="body">
29721         <p>I discovered this while doing
29722 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
29723 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
29724 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
29725 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
29726 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
29727
29728 <p>An example is from todays
29729 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
29730 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
29731 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
29732 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
29733 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
29734 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
29735 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
29736
29737 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
29738
29739 <blockquote><pre>
29740 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
29741  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
29742   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
29743 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
29744  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
29745 </pre></blockquote>
29746
29747 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
29748 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
29749 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
29750 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
29751 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
29752 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
29753 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
29754 of dependency loops.</p>
29755
29756 <p>Thanks to
29757 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
29758 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
29759 dependencies
29760 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
29761 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
29762
29763 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
29764 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
29765 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
29766 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
29767 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
29768 it.</p>
29769
29770       </div>
29771       <div class="tags">
29772
29773
29774         Tags: <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>.
29775
29776
29777       </div>
29778     </div>
29779     <div class="padding"></div>
29780
29781     <div class="entry">
29782       <div class="title">
29783         <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>
29784       </div>
29785       <div class="date">
29786         27th July 2010
29787       </div>
29788       <div class="body">
29789         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
29790 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
29791 completed.</p>
29792
29793 <blockquote>
29794 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
29795 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
29796 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
29797 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
29798 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
29799 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
29800 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
29801 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
29802
29803 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
29804 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
29805 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
29806
29807 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
29808 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
29809 much.</p>
29810
29811 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
29812
29813 <ul>
29814 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
29815 <ul>
29816   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
29817          combination with some new artwork
29818   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
29819   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
29820   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
29821   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
29822   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
29823   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
29824   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
29825   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
29826   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
29827 </ul></li>
29828 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
29829     Enabled for:
29830 <ul>
29831   <li>PAM
29832   <li>LDAP
29833   <li>IMAP
29834   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
29835 </ul>
29836 </li>
29837 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
29838 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
29839     fetched from LDAP.</li>
29840 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
29841 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
29842 </ul>
29843 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
29844
29845 <ul>
29846 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
29847     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
29848     for testing.</li>
29849 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
29850     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
29851     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
29852 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
29853 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
29854 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
29855 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
29856     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
29857 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
29858     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
29859     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
29860 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
29861     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
29862     and help out with translations.</li>
29863 </ul>
29864
29865 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
29866
29867 <ul>
29868 <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>
29869 <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>
29870 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29871 </ul>
29872 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
29873
29874 <ul>
29875 <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>
29876 <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>
29877 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29878 </ul>
29879
29880 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
29881 get closer to the final release.</p>
29882
29883 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
29884
29885 <ul>
29886 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29887 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29888 </ul>
29889
29890 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
29891 <ul>
29892 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29893 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29894 </ul>
29895 <p>How to report bugs:
29896 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
29897
29898 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
29899 </blockquote>
29900
29901       </div>
29902       <div class="tags">
29903
29904
29905         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29906
29907
29908       </div>
29909     </div>
29910     <div class="padding"></div>
29911
29912     <div class="entry">
29913       <div class="title">
29914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
29915       </div>
29916       <div class="date">
29917         25th July 2010
29918       </div>
29919       <div class="body">
29920         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
29921 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
29922 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
29923 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
29924 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
29925
29926 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
29927 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
29928 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
29929 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
29930 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
29931 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
29932 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
29933
29934 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
29935 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
29936 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
29937 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
29938 up. :)</p>
29939
29940 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
29941 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
29942 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
29943
29944 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
29945 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
29946 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
29947 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
29948 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
29949 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
29950 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
29951 release another day.</p>
29952
29953 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
29954 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29955
29956       </div>
29957       <div class="tags">
29958
29959
29960         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29961
29962
29963       </div>
29964     </div>
29965     <div class="padding"></div>
29966
29967     <div class="entry">
29968       <div class="title">
29969         <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>
29970       </div>
29971       <div class="date">
29972         18th July 2010
29973       </div>
29974       <div class="body">
29975         <p>Thanks to
29976 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
29977 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
29978 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
29979 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
29980 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
29981 only available from the development server, until more experience is
29982 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
29983
29984 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
29985 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
29986 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
29987 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
29988 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
29989 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
29990 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
29991
29992       </div>
29993       <div class="tags">
29994
29995
29996         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>.
29997
29998
29999       </div>
30000     </div>
30001     <div class="padding"></div>
30002
30003     <div class="entry">
30004       <div class="title">
30005         <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>
30006       </div>
30007       <div class="date">
30008         17th July 2010
30009       </div>
30010       <div class="body">
30011         <p>This is a
30012 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
30013 on my
30014 <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
30015 work</a> on
30016 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
30017 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
30018
30019 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
30020 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
30021 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
30022 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
30023
30024 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
30025 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
30026 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
30027
30028 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
30029
30030 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
30031 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
30032 the web.
30033
30034 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
30035 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
30036 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
30037 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
30038 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
30039 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
30040
30041 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
30042 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
30043 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
30044 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
30045 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
30046 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
30047 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
30048 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
30049 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
30050 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
30051 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
30052 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
30053 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
30054 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
30055 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
30056 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
30057
30058 <blockquote><pre>
30059 ldapsearch -h ldap \
30060   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
30061   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
30062   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
30063   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
30064   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
30065   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
30066
30067 ldapsearch -h ldap \
30068   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
30069   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
30070   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
30071   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
30072   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
30073 </pre></blockquote>
30074
30075 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
30076 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
30077 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
30078 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30079 also exist.</p>
30080
30081 <blockquote><pre>
30082 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30083 objectclass: top
30084 objectclass: dnsdomain
30085 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
30086 dc: tjener
30087 arecord: 10.0.2.2
30088 associateddomain: tjener.intern
30089
30090 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30091 objectclass: top
30092 objectclass: dnsdomain2
30093 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
30094 dc: 2
30095 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
30096 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
30097 </pre></blockquote>
30098
30099 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
30100 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
30101 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
30102 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
30103 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
30104 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
30105 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
30106 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
30107 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
30108 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
30109 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
30110 instead.</p>
30111
30112 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
30113 like this:</p>
30114
30115 <blockquote><pre>
30116 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
30117   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
30118   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
30119   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
30120   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
30121   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
30122
30123 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
30124   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
30125 </pre></blockquote>
30126
30127 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
30128 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
30129 reverse lookups.</p>
30130
30131 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
30132 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
30133 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
30134 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
30135
30136 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
30137 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
30138 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
30139
30140 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
30141 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
30142 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
30143 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
30144 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
30145
30146 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
30147 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
30148 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
30149 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
30150 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
30151
30152 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
30153 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
30154 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
30155 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
30156 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
30157 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
30158
30159 <blockquote><pre>
30160 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
30161     SUP top
30162     AUXILIARY
30163     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
30164           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
30165           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
30166           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
30167           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
30168     ))
30169 </pre></blockquote>
30170
30171 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
30172 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
30173 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
30174 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
30175 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
30176 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
30177
30178 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
30179
30180 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
30181 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
30182 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
30183 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
30184 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
30185
30186 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
30187 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
30188 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
30189 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
30190
30191 <blockquote><pre>
30192 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
30193 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
30194 </pre></blockquote>
30195
30196 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
30197 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
30198 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
30199 search result is this entry:</p>
30200
30201 <blockquote><pre>
30202 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30203 cn: dhcp
30204 objectClass: top
30205 objectClass: dhcpServer
30206 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30207 </pre></blockquote>
30208
30209 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
30210 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
30211 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
30212 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
30213 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
30214 The search result is this entry:</p>
30215
30216 <blockquote><pre>
30217 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30218 cn: DHCP Config
30219 objectClass: top
30220 objectClass: dhcpService
30221 objectClass: dhcpOptions
30222 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30223 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
30224 dhcpStatements: authoritative
30225 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
30226 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
30227 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
30228 </pre></blockquote>
30229
30230 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
30231 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
30232 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
30233 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
30234 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
30235 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
30236 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
30237 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
30238 related computer objects.</p>
30239
30240 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
30241 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
30242 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
30243 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
30244 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
30245 like:</p>
30246
30247 <blockquote><pre>
30248 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30249 cn: hostname
30250 objectClass: top
30251 objectClass: dhcpHost
30252 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
30253 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
30254 </pre></blockquote>
30255
30256 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
30257 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
30258 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
30259 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
30260 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
30261 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
30262 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
30263 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
30264 structural object class.
30265
30266 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
30267
30268 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
30269 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
30270 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
30271 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
30272 in the configuration.</p>
30273
30274 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
30275 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
30276 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
30277 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
30278 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
30279 structure.</p>
30280
30281 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
30282 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
30283
30284 <blockquote><pre>
30285 ou=services
30286   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
30287     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
30288     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
30289       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
30290         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
30291     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
30292       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
30293         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
30294     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
30295       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
30296 </pre></blockquote>
30297
30298 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
30299 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
30300 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
30301 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
30302
30303 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
30304 like this:</p>
30305
30306 <blockquote><pre>
30307 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30308 dc: hostname
30309 objectClass: top
30310 objectClass: dhcpHost
30311 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
30312 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
30313 associateddomain: hostname.intern
30314 arecord: 10.11.12.13
30315 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
30316 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
30317 </pre></blockquote>
30318
30319 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
30320 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
30321 auxiliary object class.</p>
30322
30323       </div>
30324       <div class="tags">
30325
30326
30327         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>.
30328
30329
30330       </div>
30331     </div>
30332     <div class="padding"></div>
30333
30334     <div class="entry">
30335       <div class="title">
30336         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
30337       </div>
30338       <div class="date">
30339         14th July 2010
30340       </div>
30341       <div class="body">
30342         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
30343 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
30344 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
30345 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
30346 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
30347
30348 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
30349 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
30350
30351 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
30352 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
30353 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
30354 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
30355 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
30356 to a slave DNS server.</p>
30357
30358 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
30359 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
30360 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
30361 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
30362 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
30363 seem to work.</p>
30364
30365 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
30366 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
30367 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
30368 this:</p>
30369
30370 <blockquote><pre>
30371   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30372   cn: hostname
30373   objectClass: dhcphost
30374   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
30375   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
30376   associateddomain: hostname.intern
30377   arecord: 10.11.12.13
30378   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
30379   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
30380   ldapconfigsound: Y
30381 </pre></blockquote>
30382
30383 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
30384 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
30385 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
30386 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
30387
30388 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
30389 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
30390 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
30391 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
30392 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
30393 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
30394 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
30395 might be a good place to put it.</p>
30396
30397 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30398 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30399
30400       </div>
30401       <div class="tags">
30402
30403
30404         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>.
30405
30406
30407       </div>
30408     </div>
30409     <div class="padding"></div>
30410
30411     <div class="entry">
30412       <div class="title">
30413         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
30414       </div>
30415       <div class="date">
30416         11th July 2010
30417       </div>
30418       <div class="body">
30419         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
30420 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
30421 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
30422 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
30423
30424 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
30425 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
30426 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
30427 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
30428 LTSP clients.</p>
30429
30430 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
30431 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
30432 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
30433
30434 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
30435 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
30436 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
30437
30438 <blockquote><pre>
30439 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
30440 #
30441 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
30442 #
30443 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
30444 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
30445 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
30446 #
30447 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
30448 # existence of attribute names.
30449 #
30450 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
30451 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
30452 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
30453 #
30454 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
30455 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
30456 #
30457 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
30458 #     SUP top
30459 #     AUXILIARY
30460 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
30461
30462 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
30463 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
30464     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
30465     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
30466         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
30467         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
30468             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
30469             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
30470             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
30471             # bass value on to clients
30472             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
30473         done
30474     done
30475 fi
30476 </pre></blockquote>
30477
30478 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
30479 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
30480 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
30481 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
30482 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
30483
30484 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30485 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30486
30487 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
30488 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
30489 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
30490 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
30491 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
30492 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
30493
30494       </div>
30495       <div class="tags">
30496
30497
30498         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>.
30499
30500
30501       </div>
30502     </div>
30503     <div class="padding"></div>
30504
30505     <div class="entry">
30506       <div class="title">
30507         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
30508       </div>
30509       <div class="date">
30510          9th July 2010
30511       </div>
30512       <div class="body">
30513         <p>Since
30514 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
30515 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
30516 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
30517 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
30518 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
30519 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
30520 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
30521 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
30522 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
30523 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
30524 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
30525 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
30526 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
30527
30528       </div>
30529       <div class="tags">
30530
30531
30532         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>.
30533
30534
30535       </div>
30536     </div>
30537     <div class="padding"></div>
30538
30539     <div class="entry">
30540       <div class="title">
30541         <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>
30542       </div>
30543       <div class="date">
30544          3rd July 2010
30545       </div>
30546       <div class="body">
30547         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
30548 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
30549 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
30550 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
30551 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
30552 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
30553 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
30554 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
30555
30556 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
30557 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
30558 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
30559 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
30560 publish the difference.</p>
30561
30562 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
30563
30564 <blockquote><p>
30565   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
30566   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
30567   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
30568   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
30569   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
30570   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
30571   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
30572   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
30573 </p></blockquote>
30574
30575 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
30576
30577 <blockquote><p>
30578   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
30579   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
30580   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
30581   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
30582   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
30583   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
30584   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
30585   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
30586   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
30587   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
30588   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
30589   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
30590   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
30591   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
30592   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
30593   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
30594   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
30595   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
30596   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
30597   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
30598 </p></blockquote>
30599
30600 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
30601
30602 <blockquote><p>
30603   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
30604   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
30605   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
30606   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
30607   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
30608   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
30609   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
30610   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
30611   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
30612   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
30613   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
30614   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
30615   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
30616   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
30617   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
30618   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
30619   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
30620   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
30621   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
30622   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
30623   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
30624 </p></blockquote>
30625
30626 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
30627
30628 <blockquote><p>
30629   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
30630   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
30631   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
30632 </p></blockquote>
30633
30634 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
30635 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
30636 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
30637 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
30638 the difference somewhat.
30639
30640       </div>
30641       <div class="tags">
30642
30643
30644         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>.
30645
30646
30647       </div>
30648     </div>
30649     <div class="padding"></div>
30650
30651     <div class="entry">
30652       <div class="title">
30653         <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>
30654       </div>
30655       <div class="date">
30656          1st July 2010
30657       </div>
30658       <div class="body">
30659         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
30660 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
30661 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
30662 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
30663 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
30664 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
30665 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
30666 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
30667 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
30668
30669 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
30670
30671 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
30672 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
30673 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
30674 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
30675 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
30676 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
30677 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
30678 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
30679 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
30680 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
30681 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
30682 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
30683 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
30684 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
30685 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
30686
30687 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
30688
30689 <blockquote><pre>
30690 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
30691 </pre></blockquote>
30692
30693 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
30694 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
30695 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
30696 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
30697 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
30698 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
30699 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
30700 on how to get this working.</p>
30701
30702 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
30703 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
30704 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
30705 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
30706 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
30707 instructions I found in the
30708 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
30709 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
30710
30711 <blockquote><pre>
30712         debug-level             0
30713         reload-count            unlimited
30714         paranoia                no
30715
30716         enable-cache            passwd          yes
30717         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
30718         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
30719         suggested-size          passwd          211
30720         check-files             passwd          yes
30721         persistent              passwd          yes
30722         shared                  passwd          yes
30723         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
30724         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
30725
30726         enable-cache            group           yes
30727         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
30728         negative-time-to-live   group           20
30729         suggested-size          group           211
30730         check-files             group           yes
30731         persistent              group           yes
30732         shared                  group           yes
30733         max-db-size             group           33554432
30734         auto-propagate          group           yes
30735
30736         enable-cache            hosts           no
30737         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
30738         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
30739         suggested-size          hosts           211
30740         check-files             hosts           yes
30741         persistent              hosts           yes
30742         shared                  hosts           yes
30743         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
30744
30745         enable-cache            services        yes
30746         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
30747         negative-time-to-live   services        20
30748         suggested-size          services        211
30749         check-files             services        yes
30750         persistent              services        yes
30751         shared                  services        yes
30752         max-db-size             services        33554432
30753 </pre></blockquote>
30754
30755 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
30756 automatically like the one provided in
30757 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
30758 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
30759 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
30760 look like this:</p>
30761
30762 <blockquote><pre>
30763 passwd:         files ldap
30764 group:          files ldap
30765 shadow:         files ldap
30766 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
30767 networks:       files
30768 protocols:      files
30769 services:       files
30770 ethers:         files
30771 rpc:            files
30772 netgroup:       files ldap
30773 </pre></blockquote>
30774
30775 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
30776 shadow and netgroup.</p>
30777
30778 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
30779 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
30780 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
30781 attributes cached.
30782
30783 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
30784   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
30785
30786 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
30787 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
30788 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
30789 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
30790 discovered sssd.</p>
30791
30792 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
30793
30794 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
30795 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
30796 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
30797 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
30798 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
30799 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
30800 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
30801 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
30802 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
30803 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
30804 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
30805 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
30806 version 1.2 is now in testing.
30807
30808 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
30809 roaming setup I want</p>
30810
30811 <blockquote><pre>
30812 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
30813 </pre></blockquote>
30814
30815 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
30816 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
30817
30818 <blockquote><pre>
30819 [sssd]
30820 config_file_version = 2
30821 reconnection_retries = 3
30822 sbus_timeout = 30
30823 services = nss, pam
30824 domains = INTERN
30825
30826 [nss]
30827 filter_groups = root
30828 filter_users = root
30829 reconnection_retries = 3
30830
30831 [pam]
30832 reconnection_retries = 3
30833
30834 [domain/INTERN]
30835 enumerate = false
30836 cache_credentials = true
30837
30838 id_provider = ldap
30839 auth_provider = ldap
30840 chpass_provider = ldap
30841
30842 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
30843 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
30844 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
30845 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
30846 </pre></blockquote>
30847
30848 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
30849 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
30850
30851 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
30852 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
30853 modify it manually.</p>
30854
30855 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30856 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30857
30858       </div>
30859       <div class="tags">
30860
30861
30862         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
30863
30864
30865       </div>
30866     </div>
30867     <div class="padding"></div>
30868
30869     <div class="entry">
30870       <div class="title">
30871         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
30872       </div>
30873       <div class="date">
30874         28th June 2010
30875       </div>
30876       <div class="body">
30877         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
30878 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
30879 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
30880 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
30881 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
30882 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
30883 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
30884 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
30885 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
30886 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
30887
30888 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
30889 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
30890 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
30891 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
30892 released.</p>
30893
30894 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
30895 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
30896 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
30897 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
30898
30899 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
30900 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30901
30902 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
30903 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
30904 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
30905 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
30906 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
30907
30908       </div>
30909       <div class="tags">
30910
30911
30912         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>.
30913
30914
30915       </div>
30916     </div>
30917     <div class="padding"></div>
30918
30919     <div class="entry">
30920       <div class="title">
30921         <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>
30922       </div>
30923       <div class="date">
30924         24th June 2010
30925       </div>
30926       <div class="body">
30927         <p>A while back, I
30928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
30929 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
30930 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
30931 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
30932
30933 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
30934 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
30935 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
30936 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
30937
30938 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
30939 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
30940 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
30941 Debian Edu.</p>
30942
30943 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
30944 the
30945 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
30946 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
30947 available today from IETF.</p>
30948
30949 <pre>
30950 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
30951 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
30952 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
30953  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
30954         NAME 'dhcpHost'
30955         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
30956 -       SUP top
30957 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
30958         MUST cn
30959         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
30960         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
30961 </pre>
30962
30963 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
30964 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
30965 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
30966
30967 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30968 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30969
30970       </div>
30971       <div class="tags">
30972
30973
30974         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>.
30975
30976
30977       </div>
30978     </div>
30979     <div class="padding"></div>
30980
30981     <div class="entry">
30982       <div class="title">
30983         <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>
30984       </div>
30985       <div class="date">
30986         16th June 2010
30987       </div>
30988       <div class="body">
30989         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
30990 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
30991 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
30992 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
30993 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
30994 this:
30995
30996 <blockquote><pre>
30997 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
30998 tasksel --new-install
30999 </pre></blockquote>
31000
31001 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
31002 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
31003 any output what so ever.
31004
31005 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
31006 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
31007 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
31008 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
31009 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
31010 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
31011 code like this:
31012
31013 <blockquote><pre>
31014 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
31015 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
31016 $cmd
31017 </pre></blockquote>
31018
31019 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
31020 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
31021 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
31022 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
31023 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
31024 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
31025 installation.</p>
31026
31027 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
31028 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
31029 like this.</p>
31030
31031       </div>
31032       <div class="tags">
31033
31034
31035         Tags: <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>.
31036
31037
31038       </div>
31039     </div>
31040     <div class="padding"></div>
31041
31042     <div class="entry">
31043       <div class="title">
31044         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
31045       </div>
31046       <div class="date">
31047         13th June 2010
31048       </div>
31049       <div class="body">
31050         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
31051 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
31052 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
31053 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
31054 pages.</p>
31055
31056 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
31057 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
31058 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
31059 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
31060 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
31061 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
31062 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
31063 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
31064 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
31065 see how the project is doing.</p>
31066
31067 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
31068 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
31069 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
31070 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
31071 Windows.  This is great.</p>
31072
31073       </div>
31074       <div class="tags">
31075
31076
31077         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>.
31078
31079
31080       </div>
31081     </div>
31082     <div class="padding"></div>
31083
31084     <div class="entry">
31085       <div class="title">
31086         <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>
31087       </div>
31088       <div class="date">
31089         13th June 2010
31090       </div>
31091       <div class="body">
31092         <p>My
31093 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
31094 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
31095 finally made the upgrade logs available from
31096 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
31097 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
31098 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
31099 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
31100
31101 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
31102 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
31103 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
31104 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
31105 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
31106 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
31107 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
31108 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
31109
31110 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
31111 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
31112 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
31113 too surprising.</p>
31114
31115 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
31116 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
31117 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
31118 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
31119 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
31120 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
31121 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
31122 continue.</p>
31123
31124 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
31125 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
31126   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
31127   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
31128   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
31129   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
31130   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
31131   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
31132   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
31133   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
31134   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
31135   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
31136   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
31137   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
31138   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
31139   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
31140   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
31141   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
31142   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
31143   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
31144   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
31145   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
31146   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
31147   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
31148   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
31149   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
31150   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
31151   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
31152   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
31153   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
31154
31155 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
31156
31157 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
31158   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
31159   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
31160   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
31161   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
31162   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
31163   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
31164   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
31165   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
31166   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
31167   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
31168   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
31169   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
31170   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
31171   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
31172   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
31173   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
31174   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
31175   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
31176   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
31177   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
31178   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
31179   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
31180   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
31181   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
31182   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
31183   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
31184   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
31185   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
31186   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
31187   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
31188   zip</p>
31189
31190 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
31191
31192 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
31193   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
31194   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
31195   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
31196   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
31197   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
31198   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
31199   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
31200   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
31201   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
31202   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
31203   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
31204   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
31205   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
31206   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
31207   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
31208   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
31209   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
31210   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
31211   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
31212   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
31213   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
31214   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
31215   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
31216   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
31217   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
31218   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
31219   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
31220
31221 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
31222 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
31223   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
31224   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
31225   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
31226   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
31227   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
31228   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
31229   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
31230   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
31231   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
31232   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
31233   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
31234   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
31235   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
31236   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
31237   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
31238   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
31239   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
31240   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
31241   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
31242   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
31243   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
31244   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
31245   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
31246   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
31247   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
31248   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
31249   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
31250   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
31251   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
31252   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
31253   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
31254   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
31255   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
31256   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
31257   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
31258   xulrunner-1.9</p>
31259
31260
31261       </div>
31262       <div class="tags">
31263
31264
31265         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>.
31266
31267
31268       </div>
31269     </div>
31270     <div class="padding"></div>
31271
31272     <div class="entry">
31273       <div class="title">
31274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
31275       </div>
31276       <div class="date">
31277         11th June 2010
31278       </div>
31279       <div class="body">
31280         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
31281 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
31282 have been discovered and reported in the process
31283 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
31284 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
31285 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
31286 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
31287 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
31288
31289 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
31290 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
31291 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
31292 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
31293 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
31294 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
31295
31296 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
31297 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
31298 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
31299 is created.  The bug report
31300 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
31301 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
31302 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
31303 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
31304 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
31305 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
31306 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
31307 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
31308 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
31309 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
31310 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
31311 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
31312 Debian Squeeze.</p>
31313
31314 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
31315 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
31316 trick:</p>
31317
31318 <blockquote><pre>
31319 #!/bin/sh
31320 set -ex
31321
31322 if [ "$1" ] ; then
31323     desktop=$1
31324 else
31325     desktop=gnome
31326 fi
31327
31328 from=lenny
31329 to=squeeze
31330
31331 exec &lt; /dev/null
31332 unset LANG
31333 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
31334 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
31335 fuser -mv .
31336 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
31337 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
31338 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
31339 #!/bin/sh
31340 exit 101
31341 EOF
31342 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
31343 exit_cleanup() {
31344     umount $tmpdir/proc
31345 }
31346 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
31347 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
31348 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
31349
31350 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
31351
31352 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
31353 # to return the correct answers.
31354 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
31355     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
31356
31357 # Include the desktop and laptop task
31358 for test in desktop laptop ; do
31359     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
31360 #!/bin/sh
31361 exit 2
31362 EOF
31363     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
31364 done
31365
31366 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
31367 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
31368 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
31369 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
31370
31371 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
31372 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
31373 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
31374 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
31375 fuser -mv
31376 </pre></blockquote>
31377
31378 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
31379 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
31380 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
31381 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
31382 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
31383 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
31384
31385 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
31386 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
31387 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
31388 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
31389 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
31390 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
31391 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
31392
31393 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
31394 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
31395 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
31396 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
31397 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
31398 packages.</p>
31399
31400       </div>
31401       <div class="tags">
31402
31403
31404         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>.
31405
31406
31407       </div>
31408     </div>
31409     <div class="padding"></div>
31410
31411     <div class="entry">
31412       <div class="title">
31413         <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>
31414       </div>
31415       <div class="date">
31416          6th June 2010
31417       </div>
31418       <div class="body">
31419         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
31420 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
31421 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
31422 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
31423 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
31424 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
31425 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
31426
31427 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
31428 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
31429 COLUMNS):</p>
31430
31431 <blockquote><pre>
31432 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
31433 previous=N
31434 PREVLEVEL=
31435 RUNLEVEL=
31436 runlevel=S
31437 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
31438 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
31439 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
31440 </pre></blockquote>
31441
31442 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
31443 script.</p>
31444
31445 <blockquote><pre>
31446 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
31447 previous=N
31448 PREVLEVEL=N
31449 RUNLEVEL=S
31450 runlevel=S
31451 </pre></blockquote>
31452
31453 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
31454 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
31455 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
31456
31457 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
31458 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
31459 choice.</p>
31460
31461       </div>
31462       <div class="tags">
31463
31464
31465         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>.
31466
31467
31468       </div>
31469     </div>
31470     <div class="padding"></div>
31471
31472     <div class="entry">
31473       <div class="title">
31474         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
31475       </div>
31476       <div class="date">
31477          6th June 2010
31478       </div>
31479       <div class="body">
31480         <p>Via the
31481 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
31482 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
31483 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
31484 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
31485 following the standards wars of today.</p>
31486
31487       </div>
31488       <div class="tags">
31489
31490
31491         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>.
31492
31493
31494       </div>
31495     </div>
31496     <div class="padding"></div>
31497
31498     <div class="entry">
31499       <div class="title">
31500         <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>
31501       </div>
31502       <div class="date">
31503          3rd June 2010
31504       </div>
31505       <div class="body">
31506         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
31507 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
31508 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
31509 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
31510 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
31511
31512 <blockquote><pre>
31513 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
31514   vendor                    count
31515   Dell Computer Corporation     1
31516     PowerEdge 1750              1
31517   IBM                           1
31518     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
31519   Intel                         2
31520   [no-dmi-info]                 3
31521 maintainer:~#
31522 </pre></blockquote>
31523
31524 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
31525 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
31526 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
31527 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
31528 option to list the individual machines.</p>
31529
31530 <p>A larger list is
31531 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
31532 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
31533 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
31534 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
31535 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
31536 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
31537 collector.</p>
31538
31539       </div>
31540       <div class="tags">
31541
31542
31543         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>.
31544
31545
31546       </div>
31547     </div>
31548     <div class="padding"></div>
31549
31550     <div class="entry">
31551       <div class="title">
31552         <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>
31553       </div>
31554       <div class="date">
31555          1st June 2010
31556       </div>
31557       <div class="body">
31558         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
31559 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
31560 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
31561 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
31562 wait.</p>
31563
31564 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
31565 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
31566 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
31567 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
31568 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
31569 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
31570
31571 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
31572 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
31573 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
31574 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
31575 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
31576 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
31577 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
31578 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
31579
31580 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
31581
31582       </div>
31583       <div class="tags">
31584
31585
31586         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>.
31587
31588
31589       </div>
31590     </div>
31591     <div class="padding"></div>
31592
31593     <div class="entry">
31594       <div class="title">
31595         <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>
31596       </div>
31597       <div class="date">
31598         27th May 2010
31599       </div>
31600       <div class="body">
31601         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
31602 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
31603 issues are known and should be solved:
31604
31605 <p><ul>
31606
31607 <li>The wicd package seen to
31608 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
31609 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
31610 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
31611 seem to be on the case.</li>
31612
31613 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
31614 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
31615 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
31616 maintainer is on the case.</li>
31617
31618 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
31619 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
31620 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
31621 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
31622 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
31623 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
31624 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
31625 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
31626
31627 </ul></p>
31628
31629 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
31630 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
31631 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
31632 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
31633
31634 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
31635 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
31636 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
31637 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
31638
31639 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
31640
31641       </div>
31642       <div class="tags">
31643
31644
31645         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>.
31646
31647
31648       </div>
31649     </div>
31650     <div class="padding"></div>
31651
31652     <div class="entry">
31653       <div class="title">
31654         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
31655       </div>
31656       <div class="date">
31657         22nd May 2010
31658       </div>
31659       <div class="body">
31660         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
31661 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
31662 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
31663 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
31664
31665 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
31666 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
31667 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
31668 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
31669 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
31670 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
31671 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
31672 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
31673 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
31674 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
31675 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
31676 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
31677 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
31678 going to work.</p>
31679
31680 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
31681 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
31682 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
31683 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
31684 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
31685 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
31686 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
31687 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
31688 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
31689 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
31690 Edu.</p>
31691
31692 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
31693 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
31694 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
31695 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
31696 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
31697 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
31698
31699 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
31700 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
31701
31702       </div>
31703       <div class="tags">
31704
31705
31706         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>.
31707
31708
31709       </div>
31710     </div>
31711     <div class="padding"></div>
31712
31713     <div class="entry">
31714       <div class="title">
31715         <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>
31716       </div>
31717       <div class="date">
31718         19th May 2010
31719       </div>
31720       <div class="body">
31721         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
31722 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
31723 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
31724 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
31725 into unstable.  The
31726 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
31727 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
31728 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
31729 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
31730 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
31731 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
31732 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
31733
31734 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
31735 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
31736 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
31737 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
31738 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
31739 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
31740 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
31741 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
31742
31743 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
31744 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
31745 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
31746 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
31747 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
31748 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
31749 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
31750
31751 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
31752 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
31753 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
31754 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
31755 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
31756 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
31757 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
31758 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
31759 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
31760 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
31761 on the home directory servers.</p>
31762
31763 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
31764 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
31765 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
31766 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
31767 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
31768 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
31769
31770 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
31771 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
31772
31773       </div>
31774       <div class="tags">
31775
31776
31777         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
31778
31779
31780       </div>
31781     </div>
31782     <div class="padding"></div>
31783
31784     <div class="entry">
31785       <div class="title">
31786         <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>
31787       </div>
31788       <div class="date">
31789         14th May 2010
31790       </div>
31791       <div class="body">
31792         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
31793 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
31794 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
31795 expected, if I am to believe the
31796 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
31797 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
31798 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
31799 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
31800 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
31801 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
31802 version.</p>
31803
31804 More information about
31805 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
31806 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
31807 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
31808 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
31809
31810 <blockquote><pre>
31811 CONCURRENCY=none
31812 </pre></blockquote>
31813
31814 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
31815 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
31816 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
31817 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
31818
31819       </div>
31820       <div class="tags">
31821
31822
31823         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>.
31824
31825
31826       </div>
31827     </div>
31828     <div class="padding"></div>
31829
31830     <div class="entry">
31831       <div class="title">
31832         <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>
31833       </div>
31834       <div class="date">
31835         14th May 2010
31836       </div>
31837       <div class="body">
31838         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
31839 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
31840 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
31841 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
31842 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
31843 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
31844 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
31845 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
31846
31847 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
31848 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
31849 this on the collector host:</p>
31850
31851 <blockquote><pre>
31852 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
31853 </pre></blockquote>
31854
31855 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
31856 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
31857
31858 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
31859 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
31860 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
31861 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
31862 written yet.</p>
31863
31864       </div>
31865       <div class="tags">
31866
31867
31868         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>.
31869
31870
31871       </div>
31872     </div>
31873     <div class="padding"></div>
31874
31875     <div class="entry">
31876       <div class="title">
31877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
31878       </div>
31879       <div class="date">
31880         13th May 2010
31881       </div>
31882       <div class="body">
31883         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
31884 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
31885 has been
31886 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
31887
31888 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
31889 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
31890 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
31891 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
31892 based boot system.  Tollef is
31893 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
31894 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
31895 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
31896 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
31897 at the moment do not.</p>
31898
31899 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
31900 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
31901 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
31902 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
31903 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
31904 way forward.</p>
31905
31906 <p>In the mean time, based on the
31907 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
31908 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
31909 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
31910 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
31911 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
31912 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
31913 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
31914 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
31915
31916       </div>
31917       <div class="tags">
31918
31919
31920         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>.
31921
31922
31923       </div>
31924     </div>
31925     <div class="padding"></div>
31926
31927     <div class="entry">
31928       <div class="title">
31929         <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>
31930       </div>
31931       <div class="date">
31932          6th May 2010
31933       </div>
31934       <div class="body">
31935         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
31936 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
31937 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
31938 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
31939 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
31940 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
31941 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
31942
31943 <blockquote><pre>
31944 CONCURRENCY=makefile
31945 </pre></blockquote>
31946
31947 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
31948 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
31949 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
31950 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
31951 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
31952 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
31953 make this happen.</p>
31954
31955 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
31956 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
31957 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
31958 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
31959 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
31960
31961 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
31962 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
31963 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
31964 fix the remaining issues.</p>
31965
31966 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
31967 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
31968 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
31969 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
31970
31971       </div>
31972       <div class="tags">
31973
31974
31975         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>.
31976
31977
31978       </div>
31979     </div>
31980     <div class="padding"></div>
31981
31982     <div class="entry">
31983       <div class="title">
31984         <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>
31985       </div>
31986       <div class="date">
31987          2nd May 2010
31988       </div>
31989       <div class="body">
31990         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
31991 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
31992 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
31993
31994 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
31995 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
31996 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
31997 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
31998 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
31999
32000 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
32001 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
32002
32003 <blockquote><pre>
32004 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
32005 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
32006 Password expires                                        : never
32007 Password inactive                                       : never
32008 Account expires                                         : never
32009 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
32010 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
32011 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
32012 root@tjener:~#
32013 </pre></blockquote>
32014
32015 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
32016 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
32017 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
32018 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
32019 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
32020 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
32021
32022 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
32023 intended:</p>
32024
32025 <blockquote><pre>
32026 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
32027 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
32028 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
32029 Password expires                                        : never
32030 Password inactive                                       : never
32031 Account expires                                         : never
32032 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
32033 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
32034 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
32035 root@tjener:~#
32036 </pre></blockquote>
32037
32038 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
32039 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
32040 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
32041
32042 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
32043 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
32044
32045 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
32046 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
32047
32048 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
32049 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
32050 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
32051 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
32052 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
32053 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
32054 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
32055
32056 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
32057 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
32058 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
32059 change.</p>
32060
32061       </div>
32062       <div class="tags">
32063
32064
32065         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32066
32067
32068       </div>
32069     </div>
32070     <div class="padding"></div>
32071
32072     <div class="entry">
32073       <div class="title">
32074         <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>
32075       </div>
32076       <div class="date">
32077         28th April 2010
32078       </div>
32079       <div class="body">
32080         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
32081 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
32082 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
32083 and go.</p>
32084
32085 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
32086 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
32087 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
32088 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
32089
32090 <ul>
32091
32092  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
32093    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
32094    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
32095    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
32096    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
32097    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
32098    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
32099    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
32100    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
32101    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
32102    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
32103    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
32104
32105  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
32106    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
32107    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
32108    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
32109    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
32110    or the Fedora developed
32111    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
32112    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
32113
32114  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
32115    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
32116    directory, using unison.</li>
32117
32118  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
32119    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
32120    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
32121    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
32122    implemented.</li>
32123
32124  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
32125    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
32126
32127  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
32128    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
32129    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
32130
32131 </ul>
32132
32133 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
32134 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
32135 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
32136 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
32137 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
32138 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
32139 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
32140 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
32141 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
32142
32143 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
32144 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
32145
32146       </div>
32147       <div class="tags">
32148
32149
32150         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32151
32152
32153       </div>
32154     </div>
32155     <div class="padding"></div>
32156
32157     <div class="entry">
32158       <div class="title">
32159         <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>
32160       </div>
32161       <div class="date">
32162         19th April 2010
32163       </div>
32164       <div class="body">
32165         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
32166 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
32167 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
32168 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
32169 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
32170 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
32171 restrictions on the web, for example from
32172 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
32173 epub-version from
32174 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
32175 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
32176 strongly recommend this book.</p>
32177
32178       </div>
32179       <div class="tags">
32180
32181
32182         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>.
32183
32184
32185       </div>
32186     </div>
32187     <div class="padding"></div>
32188
32189     <div class="entry">
32190       <div class="title">
32191         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
32192       </div>
32193       <div class="date">
32194         14th April 2010
32195       </div>
32196       <div class="body">
32197         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
32198 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
32199 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
32200 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
32201 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
32202 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
32203 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
32204 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
32205 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
32206
32207 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
32208 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
32209 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
32210 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
32211 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
32212
32213 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
32214 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
32215
32216 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
32217 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
32218 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
32219 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
32220 to work properly.</p>
32221
32222 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
32223 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
32224 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
32225 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
32226 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
32227 time.</p>
32228
32229 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
32230 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
32231 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
32232 up in a few days.</p>
32233
32234       </div>
32235       <div class="tags">
32236
32237
32238         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32239
32240
32241       </div>
32242     </div>
32243     <div class="padding"></div>
32244
32245     <div class="entry">
32246       <div class="title">
32247         <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>
32248       </div>
32249       <div class="date">
32250          6th March 2010
32251       </div>
32252       <div class="body">
32253         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
32254 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
32255 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
32256 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
32257 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
32258 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
32259
32260 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
32261 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
32262 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
32263 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
32264
32265 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
32266 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
32267 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
32268 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
32269 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
32270 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
32271
32272       </div>
32273       <div class="tags">
32274
32275
32276         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32277
32278
32279       </div>
32280     </div>
32281     <div class="padding"></div>
32282
32283     <div class="entry">
32284       <div class="title">
32285         <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>
32286       </div>
32287       <div class="date">
32288         11th February 2010
32289       </div>
32290       <div class="body">
32291         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
32292 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
32293 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
32294 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
32295 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
32296 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
32297 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
32298
32299 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
32300
32301 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
32302 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
32303 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
32304 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
32305
32306       </div>
32307       <div class="tags">
32308
32309
32310         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32311
32312
32313       </div>
32314     </div>
32315     <div class="padding"></div>
32316
32317     <div class="entry">
32318       <div class="title">
32319         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
32320       </div>
32321       <div class="date">
32322         27th January 2010
32323       </div>
32324       <div class="body">
32325         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
32326 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
32327 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
32328 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
32329 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
32330 further.</p>
32331
32332 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
32333 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
32334 configured to be a server for the
32335 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
32336 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
32337 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
32338 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
32339 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
32340 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
32341 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
32342 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
32343 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
32344 and Nagios configuration.</p>
32345
32346 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
32347 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
32348 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
32349 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
32350
32351 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
32352 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
32353 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
32354 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
32355 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
32356 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
32357 the machine.</p>
32358
32359 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
32360 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
32361 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
32362 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
32363
32364 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
32365 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
32366 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
32367 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
32368 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
32369 everything is taken care of.</p>
32370
32371       </div>
32372       <div class="tags">
32373
32374
32375         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
32376
32377
32378       </div>
32379     </div>
32380     <div class="padding"></div>
32381
32382     <div class="entry">
32383       <div class="title">
32384         <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>
32385       </div>
32386       <div class="date">
32387         12th August 2009
32388       </div>
32389       <div class="body">
32390         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
32391 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
32392 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
32393 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
32394
32395 <table>
32396 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
32397 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
32398 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
32399 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
32400 </table>
32401
32402 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
32403 got these numbers:</p>
32404
32405 <table>
32406 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
32407 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
32408 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
32409 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
32410 </table>
32411
32412 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
32413
32414 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
32415 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
32416 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
32417 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
32418 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
32419
32420
32421 <table>
32422 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
32423 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
32424 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
32425 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
32426 </table>
32427
32428 <p>And with 'site:no':
32429
32430 <table>
32431 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
32432 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
32433 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
32434 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
32435 </table>
32436
32437 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
32438 numbers.</p>
32439
32440       </div>
32441       <div class="tags">
32442
32443
32444         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>.
32445
32446
32447       </div>
32448     </div>
32449     <div class="padding"></div>
32450
32451     <div class="entry">
32452       <div class="title">
32453         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
32454       </div>
32455       <div class="date">
32456          8th August 2009
32457       </div>
32458       <div class="body">
32459         <p>According to <a
32460 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
32461 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
32462 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
32463 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
32464 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
32465 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
32466 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
32467 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
32468 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
32469 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
32470
32471 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
32472 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
32473 seminar this autumn.</p>
32474
32475       </div>
32476       <div class="tags">
32477
32478
32479         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>.
32480
32481
32482       </div>
32483     </div>
32484     <div class="padding"></div>
32485
32486     <div class="entry">
32487       <div class="title">
32488         <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>
32489       </div>
32490       <div class="date">
32491         27th July 2009
32492       </div>
32493       <div class="body">
32494         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
32495 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
32496 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
32497 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
32498 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
32499 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
32500 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
32501
32502 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
32503 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
32504 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
32505
32506       </div>
32507       <div class="tags">
32508
32509
32510         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>.
32511
32512
32513       </div>
32514     </div>
32515     <div class="padding"></div>
32516
32517     <div class="entry">
32518       <div class="title">
32519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
32520       </div>
32521       <div class="date">
32522         22nd July 2009
32523       </div>
32524       <div class="body">
32525         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
32526 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
32527 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
32528 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
32529 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
32530 the package up to date.</p>
32531
32532 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
32533 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
32534 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
32535 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
32536 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
32537 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
32538 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
32539 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
32540 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
32541 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
32542 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
32543 working on the future release.</p>
32544
32545 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
32546 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
32547
32548       </div>
32549       <div class="tags">
32550
32551
32552         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>.
32553
32554
32555       </div>
32556     </div>
32557     <div class="padding"></div>
32558
32559     <div class="entry">
32560       <div class="title">
32561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
32562       </div>
32563       <div class="date">
32564         24th June 2009
32565       </div>
32566       <div class="body">
32567         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
32568 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
32569 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
32570 funded
32571 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
32572 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
32573 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
32574 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
32575 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
32576 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
32577
32578 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
32579 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
32580 boot:</p>
32581
32582 <ul>
32583
32584 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
32585
32586 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
32587    clock is in UTC.</li>
32588
32589 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
32590    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
32591    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
32592
32593 </ul>
32594
32595 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
32596 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
32597 Villegas</a>.
32598
32599 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
32600 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
32601 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
32602 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
32603 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
32604 using this.</p>
32605
32606 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
32607 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
32608 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
32609 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
32610 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
32611 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
32612 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
32613
32614       </div>
32615       <div class="tags">
32616
32617
32618         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>.
32619
32620
32621       </div>
32622     </div>
32623     <div class="padding"></div>
32624
32625     <div class="entry">
32626       <div class="title">
32627         <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>
32628       </div>
32629       <div class="date">
32630          2nd May 2009
32631       </div>
32632       <div class="body">
32633         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
32634 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
32635 do not yet know them.</p>
32636
32637 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
32638 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
32639 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
32640 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
32641 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
32642 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
32643 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
32644 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
32645 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
32646 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
32647 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
32648
32649 <p>The second one is
32650 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
32651 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
32652 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
32653 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
32654 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
32655 and the company behind it is running
32656 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
32657 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
32658 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
32659 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
32660 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
32661 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
32662 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
32663 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
32664
32665 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
32666 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
32667 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
32668 surrounded by today.</p>
32669
32670       </div>
32671       <div class="tags">
32672
32673
32674         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
32675
32676
32677       </div>
32678     </div>
32679     <div class="padding"></div>
32680
32681     <div class="entry">
32682       <div class="title">
32683         <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>
32684       </div>
32685       <div class="date">
32686         28th April 2009
32687       </div>
32688       <div class="body">
32689         <p>Julien Blache
32690 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
32691 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
32692 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
32693 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
32694 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
32695 properties.</p>
32696
32697       </div>
32698       <div class="tags">
32699
32700
32701         Tags: <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>.
32702
32703
32704       </div>
32705     </div>
32706     <div class="padding"></div>
32707
32708     <div class="entry">
32709       <div class="title">
32710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
32711       </div>
32712       <div class="date">
32713          5th April 2009
32714       </div>
32715       <div class="body">
32716         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
32717 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
32718 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
32719 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
32720 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
32721 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
32722 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
32723 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
32724
32725 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
32726 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
32727 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
32728   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
32729   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
32730
32731 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
32732 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
32733 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
32734 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
32735
32736 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
32737 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
32738 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
32739 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
32740
32741 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
32742 set -e
32743 URL="$1"
32744 SAVEFILE="$2"
32745 DURATION="$3"
32746 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
32747   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
32748   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
32749 pid=$!
32750 sleep $DURATION
32751 kill $pid
32752 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
32753
32754       </div>
32755       <div class="tags">
32756
32757
32758         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>.
32759
32760
32761       </div>
32762     </div>
32763     <div class="padding"></div>
32764
32765     <div class="entry">
32766       <div class="title">
32767         <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>
32768       </div>
32769       <div class="date">
32770         30th March 2009
32771       </div>
32772       <div class="body">
32773         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
32774 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
32775 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
32776 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
32777 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
32778 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
32779 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
32780 application.</p>
32781
32782 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
32783 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
32784 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
32785 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
32786 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
32787 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
32788 blocked from doing so.</p>
32789
32790 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
32791 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
32792 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
32793 requirements change.</p>
32794
32795 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
32796 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
32797 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
32798
32799       </div>
32800       <div class="tags">
32801
32802
32803         Tags: <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>.
32804
32805
32806       </div>
32807     </div>
32808     <div class="padding"></div>
32809
32810     <div class="entry">
32811       <div class="title">
32812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
32813       </div>
32814       <div class="date">
32815         29th March 2009
32816       </div>
32817       <div class="body">
32818         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
32819 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
32820 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
32821 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
32822 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
32823 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
32824 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
32825 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
32826 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
32827 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
32828 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
32829 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
32830 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
32831 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
32832 now. :)</p>
32833
32834       </div>
32835       <div class="tags">
32836
32837
32838         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>.
32839
32840
32841       </div>
32842     </div>
32843     <div class="padding"></div>
32844
32845     <div class="entry">
32846       <div class="title">
32847         <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>
32848       </div>
32849       <div class="date">
32850         29th March 2009
32851       </div>
32852       <div class="body">
32853         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
32854 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
32855 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
32856 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
32857 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
32858 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
32859
32860 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
32861 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
32862 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
32863 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
32864 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
32865 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
32866 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
32867 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
32868 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
32869 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
32870 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
32871 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
32872 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
32873
32874 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
32875 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
32876 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
32877 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
32878
32879 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
32880 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
32881
32882 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
32883 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
32884 new IETF work group?</p>
32885
32886       </div>
32887       <div class="tags">
32888
32889
32890         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>.
32891
32892
32893       </div>
32894     </div>
32895     <div class="padding"></div>
32896
32897     <div class="entry">
32898       <div class="title">
32899         <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>
32900       </div>
32901       <div class="date">
32902         28th February 2009
32903       </div>
32904       <div class="body">
32905         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
32906 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
32907 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
32908 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
32909 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
32910 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
32911 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
32912 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
32913 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
32914 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
32915 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
32916 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
32917 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
32918 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
32919 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
32920 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
32921 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
32922 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
32923 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
32924 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
32925 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
32926 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
32927 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
32928 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
32929 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
32930 machine.</p>
32931
32932 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
32933 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
32934 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
32935 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
32936 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
32937 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
32938 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
32939
32940 <pre>
32941 use LWP::Simple;
32942 use POSIX;
32943 use WWW::Mechanize;
32944 use Date::Parse;
32945 [...]
32946 sub get_support_info {
32947     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
32948     my $str;
32949
32950     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
32951         # fetch website from Dell support
32952         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";
32953         my $webpage = get($url);
32954         return undef unless ($webpage);
32955
32956         my $daysleft = -1;
32957         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
32958         foreach my $line (@lines) {
32959             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
32960             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
32961             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
32962
32963             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
32964             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
32965             my $lastend = "";
32966             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
32967                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
32968
32969                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32970                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
32971                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32972                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
32973                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
32974                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
32975                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
32976             }
32977             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
32978             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
32979                 if ($lastend lt $today);
32980         }
32981     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
32982         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
32983         my $url =
32984             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
32985         $mech->get($url);
32986         my $fields = {
32987             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
32988             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
32989             'country' => 'NO',
32990             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
32991             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
32992         };
32993         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
32994                             fields      => $fields );
32995         # Next step is screen scraping
32996         my $content = $mech->content();
32997
32998         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
32999         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
33000         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
33001         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
33002
33003         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
33004
33005         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
33006             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
33007                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
33008             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
33009             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
33010                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
33011             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
33012                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
33013
33014             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
33015
33016             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
33017                 if ($end lt $today);
33018         }
33019     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
33020         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
33021         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
33022         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
33023             my $content =
33024                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
33025             if ($content) {
33026                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
33027                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
33028                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
33029                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
33030
33031                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
33032                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
33033
33034                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
33035
33036                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
33037                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
33038                     if ($end lt $today);
33039             }
33040         }
33041     }
33042     return $str;
33043 }
33044 </pre>
33045
33046 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
33047 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
33048 from dmidecode.</p>
33049
33050 <pre>
33051 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
33052                        "447707-B21");
33053 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
33054 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
33055                        "1234567");
33056 </pre>
33057
33058 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
33059 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
33060
33061 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
33062 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
33063 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
33064 do so.</p>
33065
33066       </div>
33067       <div class="tags">
33068
33069
33070         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>.
33071
33072
33073       </div>
33074     </div>
33075     <div class="padding"></div>
33076
33077     <div class="entry">
33078       <div class="title">
33079         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
33080       </div>
33081       <div class="date">
33082         20th February 2009
33083       </div>
33084       <div class="body">
33085         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
33086 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
33087 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
33088 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
33089 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
33090 the "missing" computer.</p>
33091
33092 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
33093 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
33094 code blocks as defined in the
33095 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
33096 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
33097 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
33098 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
33099 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
33100 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
33101 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
33102 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
33103 codes.</p>
33104
33105 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
33106 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
33107 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
33108 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
33109 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
33110 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
33111
33112 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
33113 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
33114 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
33115 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
33116 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
33117 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
33118 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
33119 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
33120 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
33121 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
33122
33123 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
33124 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
33125 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
33126
33127       </div>
33128       <div class="tags">
33129
33130
33131         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>.
33132
33133
33134       </div>
33135     </div>
33136     <div class="padding"></div>
33137
33138     <div class="entry">
33139       <div class="title">
33140         <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>
33141       </div>
33142       <div class="date">
33143         17th January 2009
33144       </div>
33145       <div class="body">
33146         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
33147 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
33148 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
33149 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
33150 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
33151 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
33152 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
33153 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
33154 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
33155 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
33156 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
33157 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
33158 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
33159 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
33160
33161 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
33162 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
33163 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
33164 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
33165 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
33166 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
33167 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
33168 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
33169 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
33170 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
33171 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
33172 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
33173 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
33174 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
33175 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
33176 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
33177 playing when the download is done.</p>
33178
33179 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
33180 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
33181 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
33182 too.</p>
33183
33184 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
33185 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
33186 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
33187 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
33188
33189       </div>
33190       <div class="tags">
33191
33192
33193         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>.
33194
33195
33196       </div>
33197     </div>
33198     <div class="padding"></div>
33199
33200     <div class="entry">
33201       <div class="title">
33202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
33203       </div>
33204       <div class="date">
33205         28th December 2008
33206       </div>
33207       <div class="body">
33208         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
33209 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
33210 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
33211 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
33212 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
33213 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
33214 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
33215 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
33216 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
33217 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
33218 source, sink and mixer applications and
33219 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
33220 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
33221 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
33222 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
33223 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
33224 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
33225 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
33226 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
33227 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
33228
33229 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
33230 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
33231 larger stick as well.</p>
33232
33233       </div>
33234       <div class="tags">
33235
33236
33237         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>.
33238
33239
33240       </div>
33241     </div>
33242     <div class="padding"></div>
33243
33244     <div class="entry">
33245       <div class="title">
33246         <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>
33247       </div>
33248       <div class="date">
33249          7th December 2008
33250       </div>
33251       <div class="body">
33252         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
33253 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
33254 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
33255 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
33256 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
33257 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
33258 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
33259 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
33260
33261 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
33262 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
33263 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
33264 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
33265 of these cards.</p>
33266
33267       </div>
33268       <div class="tags">
33269
33270
33271         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>.
33272
33273
33274       </div>
33275     </div>
33276     <div class="padding"></div>
33277
33278     <div class="entry">
33279       <div class="title">
33280         <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>
33281       </div>
33282       <div class="date">
33283         25th November 2008
33284       </div>
33285       <div class="body">
33286         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
33287 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
33288 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
33289 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
33290 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
33291 notes are available on
33292 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
33293 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
33294 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
33295 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
33296 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
33297 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
33298 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
33299 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
33300 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
33301
33302 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
33303 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
33304
33305       </div>
33306       <div class="tags">
33307
33308
33309         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>.
33310
33311
33312       </div>
33313     </div>
33314     <div class="padding"></div>
33315
33316     <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>
33317     <div id="sidebar">
33318
33319
33320
33321 <h2>Archive</h2>
33322 <ul>
33323
33324 <li>2020
33325 <ul>
33326
33327 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/02/">February (2)</a></li>
33328
33329 </ul></li>
33330
33331 <li>2019
33332 <ul>
33333
33334 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/01/">January (4)</a></li>
33335
33336 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/02/">February (3)</a></li>
33337
33338 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/03/">March (3)</a></li>
33339
33340 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/05/">May (2)</a></li>
33341
33342 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/06/">June (5)</a></li>
33343
33344 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/07/">July (2)</a></li>
33345
33346 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/08/">August (1)</a></li>
33347
33348 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/09/">September (1)</a></li>
33349
33350 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/11/">November (1)</a></li>
33351
33352 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/12/">December (4)</a></li>
33353
33354 </ul></li>
33355
33356 <li>2018
33357 <ul>
33358
33359 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
33360
33361 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
33362
33363 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
33364
33365 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
33366
33367 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
33368
33369 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
33370
33371 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
33372
33373 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
33374
33375 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/10/">October (5)</a></li>
33376
33377 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/11/">November (2)</a></li>
33378
33379 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/12/">December (4)</a></li>
33380
33381 </ul></li>
33382
33383 <li>2017
33384 <ul>
33385
33386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
33387
33388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
33389
33390 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
33391
33392 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
33393
33394 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
33395
33396 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
33397
33398 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
33399
33400 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
33401
33402 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
33403
33404 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
33405
33406 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
33407
33408 </ul></li>
33409
33410 <li>2016
33411 <ul>
33412
33413 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
33414
33415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
33416
33417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
33418
33419 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
33420
33421 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
33422
33423 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
33424
33425 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
33426
33427 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
33428
33429 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
33430
33431 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
33432
33433 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
33434
33435 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
33436
33437 </ul></li>
33438
33439 <li>2015
33440 <ul>
33441
33442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
33443
33444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
33445
33446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
33447
33448 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
33449
33450 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
33451
33452 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
33453
33454 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
33455
33456 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
33457
33458 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
33459
33460 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
33461
33462 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
33463
33464 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
33465
33466 </ul></li>
33467
33468 <li>2014
33469 <ul>
33470
33471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
33472
33473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
33474
33475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
33476
33477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
33478
33479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
33480
33481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
33482
33483 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
33484
33485 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
33486
33487 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
33488
33489 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
33490
33491 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
33492
33493 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
33494
33495 </ul></li>
33496
33497 <li>2013
33498 <ul>
33499
33500 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
33501
33502 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
33503
33504 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
33505
33506 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
33507
33508 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
33509
33510 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
33511
33512 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
33513
33514 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
33515
33516 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
33517
33518 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
33519
33520 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
33521
33522 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
33523
33524 </ul></li>
33525
33526 <li>2012
33527 <ul>
33528
33529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
33530
33531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
33532
33533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
33534
33535 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
33536
33537 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
33538
33539 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
33540
33541 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
33542
33543 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
33544
33545 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
33546
33547 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
33548
33549 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
33550
33551 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
33552
33553 </ul></li>
33554
33555 <li>2011
33556 <ul>
33557
33558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
33559
33560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
33561
33562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
33563
33564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
33565
33566 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
33567
33568 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
33569
33570 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
33571
33572 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
33573
33574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
33575
33576 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
33577
33578 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
33579
33580 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
33581
33582 </ul></li>
33583
33584 <li>2010
33585 <ul>
33586
33587 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
33588
33589 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
33590
33591 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
33592
33593 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
33594
33595 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
33596
33597 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
33598
33599 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
33600
33601 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
33602
33603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
33604
33605 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
33606
33607 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
33608
33609 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
33610
33611 </ul></li>
33612
33613 <li>2009
33614 <ul>
33615
33616 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
33617
33618 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
33619
33620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
33621
33622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
33623
33624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
33625
33626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
33627
33628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
33629
33630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
33631
33632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
33633
33634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
33635
33636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
33637
33638 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
33639
33640 </ul></li>
33641
33642 <li>2008
33643 <ul>
33644
33645 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
33646
33647 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
33648
33649 </ul></li>
33650
33651 </ul>
33652
33653
33654
33655 <h2>Tags</h2>
33656 <ul>
33657
33658  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
33659
33660  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
33661
33662  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
33663
33664  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
33665
33666  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/betalkontant">betalkontant (8)</a></li>
33667
33668  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (11)</a></li>
33669
33670  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
33671
33672  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
33673
33674  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
33675
33676  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (168)</a></li>
33677
33678  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
33679
33680  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
33681
33682  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (11)</a></li>
33683
33684  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
33685
33686  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (26)</a></li>
33687
33688  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
33689
33690  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (412)</a></li>
33691
33692  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
33693
33694  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (14)</a></li>
33695
33696  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (34)</a></li>
33697
33698  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
33699
33700  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (20)</a></li>
33701
33702  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
33703
33704  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
33705
33706  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
33707
33708  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (22)</a></li>
33709
33710  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (4)</a></li>
33711
33712  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
33713
33714  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
33715
33716  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
33717
33718  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
33719
33720  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
33721
33722  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
33723
33724  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (42)</a></li>
33725
33726  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (12)</a></li>
33727
33728  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5 (21)</a></li>
33729
33730  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (311)</a></li>
33731
33732  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (196)</a></li>
33733
33734  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (37)</a></li>
33735
33736  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
33737
33738  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (75)</a></li>
33739
33740  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (111)</a></li>
33741
33742  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
33743
33744  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
33745
33746  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
33747
33748  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
33749
33750  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (12)</a></li>
33751
33752  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
33753
33754  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (7)</a></li>
33755
33756  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
33757
33758  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (56)</a></li>
33759
33760  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
33761
33762  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
33763
33764  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (69)</a></li>
33765
33766  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
33767
33768  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
33769
33770  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (57)</a></li>
33771
33772  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
33773
33774  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
33775
33776  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
33777
33778  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (17)</a></li>
33779
33780  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (73)</a></li>
33781
33782  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
33783
33784  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (42)</a></li>
33785
33786 </ul>
33787
33788
33789     </div>
33790     <p style="text-align: right">
33791  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
33792 </p>
33793
33794   </body>
33795 </html>