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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/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         30th December 2014
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I am very happy that we in the
  32 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
  33 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
  34 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
  35 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
  36 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
  37 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
  38 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
  39 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
  40 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
  41 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
  42
  43 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
  44 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
  45 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
  46 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
  47 reports in public.</p>
  48
  49       </div>
  50       <div class="tags">
  51
  52
  53         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>.
  54
  55
  56       </div>
  57     </div>
  58     <div class="padding"></div>
  59
  60     <div class="entry">
  61       <div class="title">
  62         <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>
  63       </div>
  64       <div class="date">
  65         19th December 2014
  66       </div>
  67       <div class="body">
  68         <p>So, Sony caved in
  69 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
  70 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
  71 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
  72 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
  73 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
  74 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
  75 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
  76 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
  77 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
  78 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
  79 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
  80 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
  81 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
  82
  83 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
  84 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
  85 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
  86 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
  87
  88 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
  89 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
  90 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
  91 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
  92 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
  93 income. :)</p>
  94
  95       </div>
  96       <div class="tags">
  97
  98
  99         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>.
 100
 101
 102       </div>
 103     </div>
 104     <div class="padding"></div>
 105
 106     <div class="entry">
 107       <div class="title">
 108         <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>
 109       </div>
 110       <div class="date">
 111         22nd November 2014
 112       </div>
 113       <div class="body">
 114         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
 115 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
 116 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
 117 courtesy of
 118 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
 119 Schubert</a> and
 120 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
 121 McVittie</a>.
 122
 123 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
 124 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
 125 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
 126 you upgrade:</p>
 127
 128 <p><blockquote><pre>
 129 Package: systemd-sysv
 130 Pin: release o=Debian
 131 Pin-Priority: -1
 132 </pre></blockquote><p>
 133
 134 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
 135 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
 136 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
 137 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
 138 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
 139
 140 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
 141 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
 142 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
 143 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
 144 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
 145 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
 146
 147 <p><blockquote><pre>
 148 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
 149 </pre></blockquote><p>
 150
 151 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
 152
 153 <p><blockquote><pre>
 154 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
 155 </pre></blockquote><p>
 156
 157 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
 158 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
 159
 160 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
 161 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
 162 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
 163 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
 164 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
 165 Jessie is released.</p>
 166
 167 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
 168 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
 169 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
 170 line.</p>
 171
 172       </div>
 173       <div class="tags">
 174
 175
 176         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>.
 177
 178
 179       </div>
 180     </div>
 181     <div class="padding"></div>
 182
 183     <div class="entry">
 184       <div class="title">
 185         <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>
 186       </div>
 187       <div class="date">
 188         10th November 2014
 189       </div>
 190       <div class="body">
 191         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
 192 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
 193 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
 194
 195 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
 196 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
 197 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
 198 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
 199 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
 200 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
 201 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
 202 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
 203 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
 204 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
 205 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
 206 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
 207 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
 208 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
 209 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
 210
 211 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
 212 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
 213 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
 214 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
 215 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
 216 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
 217 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
 218 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
 219 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
 220 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
 221 were fairly easy, and
 222 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
 223 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
 224 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
 225 useful approach.</p>
 226
 227 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
 228 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
 229 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
 230 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
 231 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
 232 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
 233 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
 234 this:</p>
 235
 236 <p><blockquote><pre>
 237 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
 238   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
 239 </pre></blockquote></p>
 240
 241 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
 242 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
 243
 244 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
 245 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
 246 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
 247 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
 248 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
 249 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
 250 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
 251 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
 252 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
 253 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
 254 system.</p>
 255
 256 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
 257 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
 258 SMTorP. :)</p>
 259
 260       </div>
 261       <div class="tags">
 262
 263
 264         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
 265
 266
 267       </div>
 268     </div>
 269     <div class="padding"></div>
 270
 271     <div class="entry">
 272       <div class="title">
 273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
 274       </div>
 275       <div class="date">
 276         27th October 2014
 277       </div>
 278       <div class="body">
 279         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
 280 sent out
 281 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
 282 announcement</a>:</p>
 283
 284 <pre>
 285 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
 286 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
 287
 288 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
 289 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
 290 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
 291 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
 292 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
 293 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
 294 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
 295
 296 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
 297 installation instructions are available, including detailed
 298 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
 299 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
 300 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
 301 of at least 5 characters!
 302
 303  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
 304
 305 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
 306 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
 307 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
 308 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
 309 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
 310
 311 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
 312 mostly in Germany and Norway.
 313
 314 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
 315 ===============================
 316
 317 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
 318 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
 319 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
 320 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
 321 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
 322 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
 323 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
 324 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
 325 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
 326 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
 327 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
 328 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
 329 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
 330 environment.
 331
 332  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
 333  [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;
 334
 335 Full release notes and manual
 336 =============================
 337
 338 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
 339 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
 340 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
 341 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
 342 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
 343
 344  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
 345  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
 346
 347 Where to get it
 348 ---------------
 349
 350 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
 351
 352  * <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>
 353  * <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>
 354  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
 355
 356 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
 357
 358 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
 359 ===============================================================================
 360
 361
 362 Installation changes
 363 --------------------
 364
 365  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
 366
 367 Software updates
 368 ----------------
 369
 370 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
 371
 372  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
 373  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
 374    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
 375    choose one of the others see manual.)
 376  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
 377  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
 378  * GOsa 2.7.4
 379  * LTSP 5.5.4
 380  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 381  * new boot framework: systemd
 382  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
 383  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 384  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 385  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
 386  * golearn 0.9
 387  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 388  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 389  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
 390    installation.
 391  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
 392    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
 393
 394  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
 395  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
 396
 397 Fixed bugs
 398 ----------
 399
 400  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
 401    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
 402    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
 403  * and many others.
 404
 405 Documentation and translation updates
 406 -------------------------------------
 407
 408  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
 409    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
 410    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
 411
 412 Other changes
 413 -------------
 414
 415  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
 416    server takes more time.
 417  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
 418    doesn't work.
 419
 420 Regressions / known problems
 421 ----------------------------
 422
 423  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
 424    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
 425    and Debian bug #762103).
 426  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
 427    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
 428  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
 429    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
 430    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
 431
 432 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
 433
 434  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
 435
 436 How to report bugs
 437 ------------------
 438
 439 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
 440
 441 About Debian
 442 ============
 443
 444 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
 445 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
 446 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
 447 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
 448 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
 449 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
 450 operating system.
 451
 452 Contact Information
 453 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
 454 mail to press@debian.org.
 455
 456  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
 457 </pre>
 458
 459       </div>
 460       <div class="tags">
 461
 462
 463         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 464
 465
 466       </div>
 467     </div>
 468     <div class="padding"></div>
 469
 470     <div class="entry">
 471       <div class="title">
 472         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
 473       </div>
 474       <div class="date">
 475         23rd October 2014
 476       </div>
 477       <div class="body">
 478         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
 479 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
 480 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
 481 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
 482 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
 483 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
 484 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
 485 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
 486 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
 487 live.</p>
 488
 489 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
 490 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
 491 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
 492 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
 493 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
 494 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
 495 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
 496 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
 497
 498       </div>
 499       <div class="tags">
 500
 501
 502         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>.
 503
 504
 505       </div>
 506     </div>
 507     <div class="padding"></div>
 508
 509     <div class="entry">
 510       <div class="title">
 511         <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>
 512       </div>
 513       <div class="date">
 514         22nd October 2014
 515       </div>
 516       <div class="body">
 517         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
 518 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
 519 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
 520 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
 521 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
 522 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
 523 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
 524 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
 525 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
 526 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
 527 lists I recently took over:</p>
 528
 529 <p><blockquote><pre>
 530 % time listadmin xiph
 531 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 532 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 533
 534 real    0m1.709s
 535 user    0m0.232s
 536 sys     0m0.012s
 537 %
 538 </pre></blockquote></p>
 539
 540 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
 541 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
 542 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
 543 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
 544 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
 545 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
 546 program.</p>
 547
 548 <p>If you install
 549 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
 550 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
 551 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
 552
 553 <p><blockquote><pre>
 554 username username@example.org
 555 spamlevel 23
 556 default discard
 557 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
 558
 559 password secret
 560 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
 561 mailman-list@lists.example.com
 562
 563 password hidden
 564 other-list@otherserver.example.org
 565 </pre></blockquote></p>
 566
 567 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
 568 learn the details.</p>
 569
 570 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
 571 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
 572 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
 573 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
 574
 575 <p><blockquote><pre>
 576 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
 577 </pre></blockquote></p>
 578
 579 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
 580 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
 581 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
 582 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
 583 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
 584 email.</p>
 585
 586 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
 587 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
 588 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
 589 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
 590 software.</p>
 591
 592 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 593 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 594 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 595
 596 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
 597 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
 598 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
 599 sure why.</p>
 600
 601       </div>
 602       <div class="tags">
 603
 604
 605         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 606
 607
 608       </div>
 609     </div>
 610     <div class="padding"></div>
 611
 612     <div class="entry">
 613       <div class="title">
 614         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
 615       </div>
 616       <div class="date">
 617         17th October 2014
 618       </div>
 619       <div class="body">
 620         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
 621 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
 622 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
 623 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
 624 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
 625 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
 626 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
 627
 628 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
 629 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
 630 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
 631 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
 632 of this story.)</p>
 633
 634 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
 635 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
 636 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
 637 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
 638 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
 639 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
 640 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
 641 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
 642 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
 643 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
 644
 645 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
 646 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
 647 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
 648 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
 649
 650 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
 651 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
 652
 653 <p><blockquote><pre>
 654 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
 655 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
 656 </pre></blockquote></p>
 657
 658 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
 659 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
 660 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
 661 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
 662 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
 663 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
 664 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
 665 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
 666
 667 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
 668 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
 669
 670 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
 671 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
 672 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
 673 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
 674 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
 675
 676 <p><blockquote><pre>
 677 Task: isenkram-packages
 678 Section: hardware
 679 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 680  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
 681  proposed.
 682 Test-new-install: show show
 683 Relevance: 8
 684 Packages: for-current-hardware
 685
 686 Task: isenkram-firmware
 687 Section: hardware
 688 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 689  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
 690  packages are proposed.
 691 Test-new-install: mark show
 692 Relevance: 8
 693 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
 694 </pre></blockquote></p>
 695
 696 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
 697 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
 698 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
 699 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
 700 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
 701
 702 <p><blockquote><pre>
 703 #!/bin/sh
 704 #
 705 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
 706 export PATH
 707 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
 708 </pre></blockquote></p>
 709
 710 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
 711 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
 712
 713 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
 714 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
 715 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
 716 install.</p>
 717
 718 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
 719 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
 720 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
 721
 722       </div>
 723       <div class="tags">
 724
 725
 726         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
 727
 728
 729       </div>
 730     </div>
 731     <div class="padding"></div>
 732
 733     <div class="entry">
 734       <div class="title">
 735         <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>
 736       </div>
 737       <div class="date">
 738          4th October 2014
 739       </div>
 740       <div class="body">
 741         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
 742 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
 743 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
 744 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
 745
 746 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
 747
 748 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
 749 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
 750 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
 751
 752       </div>
 753       <div class="tags">
 754
 755
 756         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 757
 758
 759       </div>
 760     </div>
 761     <div class="padding"></div>
 762
 763     <div class="entry">
 764       <div class="title">
 765         <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>
 766       </div>
 767       <div class="date">
 768          4th October 2014
 769       </div>
 770       <div class="body">
 771         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
 772 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
 773 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
 774 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
 775 Dibb.</p>
 776
 777 <p>I just wrapped up
 778 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
 779 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
 780 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
 781 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
 782 0.17.</p>
 783
 784 <ul>
 785
 786  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
 787  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
 788    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
 789  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
 790  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
 791  <li>Fix include orders</li>
 792  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
 793  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
 794  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
 795    the palette size is the same.</li>
 796  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
 797  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
 798  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
 799  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
 800    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
 801
 802 </ul>
 803
 804 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
 805 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
 806 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
 807
 808       </div>
 809       <div class="tags">
 810
 811
 812         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
 813
 814
 815       </div>
 816     </div>
 817     <div class="padding"></div>
 818
 819     <div class="entry">
 820       <div class="title">
 821         <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>
 822       </div>
 823       <div class="date">
 824         26th September 2014
 825       </div>
 826       <div class="body">
 827         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
 828 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
 829 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
 830 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
 831 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
 832 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
 833 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
 834 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
 835 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
 836 future.  The
 837 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
 838 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
 839 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
 840 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
 841 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
 842
 843 <p>First, download the test ISO via
 844 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
 845 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
 846 or rsync (use
 847 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
 848 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
 849 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
 850 install with some tweaking.</p>
 851
 852 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
 853 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
 854
 855 <p><blockquote><pre>
 856 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
 857 </pre></blockquote></p>
 858
 859 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
 860 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
 861 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
 862 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
 863
 864 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
 865 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
 866 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
 867 your need.</p>
 868
 869 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
 870 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
 871 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
 872 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
 873 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
 874 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
 875 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
 876 days.</p>
 877
 878 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
 879 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
 880 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
 881 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
 882 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
 883 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
 884 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
 885 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
 886 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
 887
 888 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
 889 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
 890 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
 891
 892       </div>
 893       <div class="tags">
 894
 895
 896         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>.
 897
 898
 899       </div>
 900     </div>
 901     <div class="padding"></div>
 902
 903     <div class="entry">
 904       <div class="title">
 905         <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>
 906       </div>
 907       <div class="date">
 908         25th September 2014
 909       </div>
 910       <div class="body">
 911         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
 912 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
 913 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
 914 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
 915 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
 916 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
 917 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
 918 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
 919 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
 920 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
 921 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
 922 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
 923 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
 924
 925 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
 926 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
 927 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
 928 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
 929 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
 930 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
 931 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
 932 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
 933 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
 934 list</a>. :)</p>
 935
 936       </div>
 937       <div class="tags">
 938
 939
 940         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
 941
 942
 943       </div>
 944     </div>
 945     <div class="padding"></div>
 946
 947     <div class="entry">
 948       <div class="title">
 949         <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>
 950       </div>
 951       <div class="date">
 952         16th September 2014
 953       </div>
 954       <div class="body">
 955         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
 956 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
 957 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
 958 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
 959 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
 960 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
 961 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
 962 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
 963 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
 964 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
 965 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
 966 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
 967 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
 968 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
 969
 970 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
 971 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
 972 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
 973 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
 974 depend on the small and clever package
 975 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
 976 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
 977 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
 978 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
 979 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
 980 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
 981 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
 982 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
 983 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
 984 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
 985 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
 986
 987 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
 988 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
 989 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
 990 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
 991 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
 992 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
 993 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
 994 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
 995 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
 996 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
 997 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
 998 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
 999 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
1000 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
1001 dialog.</p>
1002
1003 <p><table>
1004
1005 <tr>
1006 <th>Machine/setup</th>
1007 <th>Original tasksel</th>
1008 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
1009 <th>Reduction</th>
1010 </tr>
1011
1012 <tr>
1013 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
1014 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
1015 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
1016 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
1017 </tr>
1018
1019 <tr>
1020 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
1021 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
1022 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
1023 <td>23 min 40%</td>
1024 </tr>
1025
1026 <tr>
1027 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
1028 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
1029 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
1030 <td>11 min 50%</td>
1031 </tr>
1032
1033 <tr>
1034 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
1035 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
1036 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
1037 <td>2 min 33%</td>
1038 </tr>
1039
1040 <tr>
1041 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
1042 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
1043 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
1044 <td>4 min 21%</td>
1045 </tr>
1046
1047 </table></p>
1048
1049 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
1050 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
1051 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
1052 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
1053 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
1054 installed.</p>
1055
1056 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
1057 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
1058 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
1059 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
1060 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
1061 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
1062 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
1063 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
1064 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
1065 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
1066 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
1067 for the entire installation.</p>
1068
1069 <p>I've implemented this in the
1070 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
1071 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
1072 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
1073 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
1074 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
1075
1076 <p><blockquote><pre>
1077 #!/bin/sh
1078 set -e
1079 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1080 info() {
1081     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
1082 }
1083 error() {
1084     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
1085 }
1086 override_install() {
1087     apt-install eatmydata || true
1088     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
1089         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1090             file=/usr/bin/$bin
1091             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
1092             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
1093                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
1094                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
1095                     > /target$file.edu
1096                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
1097                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1098                     --rename --quiet --add $file
1099                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
1100             else
1101                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
1102             fi
1103         done
1104     else
1105         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
1106     fi
1107 }
1108
1109 override_install
1110 </pre></blockquote></p>
1111
1112 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
1113 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
1114
1115 <p><blockquote><pre>
1116 #! /bin/sh -e
1117 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1118 error() {
1119     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
1120 }
1121 remove_install_override() {
1122     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1123         file=/usr/bin/$bin
1124         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
1125             rm /target$file
1126             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1127                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
1128             rm /target$file.edu
1129         else
1130             error "Missing divert for $file."
1131         fi
1132     done
1133     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
1134 }
1135
1136 remove_install_override
1137 </pre></blockquote></p>
1138
1139 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
1140 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
1141 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
1142
1143 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
1144 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
1145 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
1146 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
1147 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
1148 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
1149 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
1150 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
1151 everyone.</p>
1152
1153 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
1154 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
1155 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
1156 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
1157
1158 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
1159 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
1160 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
1161 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
1162 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
1163
1164 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
1165 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
1166 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
1167 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
1168 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
1169
1170       </div>
1171       <div class="tags">
1172
1173
1174         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>.
1175
1176
1177       </div>
1178     </div>
1179     <div class="padding"></div>
1180
1181     <div class="entry">
1182       <div class="title">
1183         <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>
1184       </div>
1185       <div class="date">
1186         10th September 2014
1187       </div>
1188       <div class="body">
1189         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
1190 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
1191 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
1192 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
1193 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
1194 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
1195 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
1196 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
1197 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
1198 those problems are gone now.</p>
1199
1200 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
1201 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
1202 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
1203 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
1204 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
1205
1206 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
1207 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
1208 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
1209
1210 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
1211 line:</p>
1212
1213 <p><blockquote><pre>
1214 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
1215 </pre></blockquote></p>
1216
1217 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
1218 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
1219 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
1220 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
1221
1222 <p><blockquote><pre>
1223 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
1224 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
1225 %
1226 </pre></blockquote></p>
1227
1228 <p>Now if only
1229 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
1230 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
1231 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
1232 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
1233 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
1234 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
1235 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
1236 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
1237 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
1238
1239       </div>
1240       <div class="tags">
1241
1242
1243         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
1244
1245
1246       </div>
1247     </div>
1248     <div class="padding"></div>
1249
1250     <div class="entry">
1251       <div class="title">
1252         <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>
1253       </div>
1254       <div class="date">
1255         25th August 2014
1256       </div>
1257       <div class="body">
1258         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
1259 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
1260 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
1261 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
1262 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
1263 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
1264 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
1265 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
1266 am not sure.
1267 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
1268 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
1269 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
1270 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
1271 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
1272 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
1273 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
1274 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
1275 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
1276 licenses are.</p>
1277
1278 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
1279 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
1280 end user</a>
1281 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
1282 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
1283
1284 <p><blockquote>
1285 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
1286 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
1287
1288 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
1289 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
1290 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
1291 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
1292 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
1293 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
1294 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
1295 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
1296 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
1297 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
1298 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
1299 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
1300 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
1301 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
1302 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
1303 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
1304 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
1305 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
1306
1307 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
1308 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
1309
1310 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
1311 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
1312 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
1313 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
1314 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
1315 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
1316 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
1317 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
1318 </blockquote></p>
1319
1320 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
1321 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
1322
1323 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
1324 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
1325
1326 <p><blockquote>
1327
1328 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
1329 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
1330 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
1331 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
1332 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
1333 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
1334 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
1335 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
1336 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
1337 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
1338 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
1339 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
1340
1341 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
1342 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
1343 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
1344 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
1345 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
1346 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
1347 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
1348 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
1349 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
1350 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
1351 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
1352 additional details.</p>
1353
1354 </blockquote></p>
1355
1356 <p>Some free software like
1357 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
1358 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
1359 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
1360 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
1361
1362       </div>
1363       <div class="tags">
1364
1365
1366         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1367
1368
1369       </div>
1370     </div>
1371     <div class="padding"></div>
1372
1373     <div class="entry">
1374       <div class="title">
1375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
1376       </div>
1377       <div class="date">
1378         31st July 2014
1379       </div>
1380       <div class="body">
1381         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
1382 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
1383 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
1384 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
1385 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
1386 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
1387
1388 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1389
1390 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
1391 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
1392 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
1393 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
1394 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
1395 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
1396 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
1397 works with Windows . :-(</p>
1398
1399 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
1400 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
1401 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
1402 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
1403 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
1404 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
1405
1406 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
1407 project?</strong></p>
1408
1409 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
1410 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
1411 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
1412 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
1413 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
1414 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
1415 with this job.</p>
1416
1417 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1418 Edu?</strong></p>
1419
1420 <p>The independence.</p>
1421
1422 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
1423 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
1424 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
1425
1426 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
1427 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
1428 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
1429 working reliable. </p>
1430
1431 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
1432 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
1433 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
1434 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
1435 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
1436 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
1437 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
1438 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
1439
1440 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1441 Edu?</strong></p>
1442
1443 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
1444 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
1445 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
1446
1447 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1448
1449 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
1450 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
1451
1452 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1453 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1454
1455 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
1456 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
1457 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
1458 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
1459 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
1460 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
1461 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
1462
1463       </div>
1464       <div class="tags">
1465
1466
1467         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
1468
1469
1470       </div>
1471     </div>
1472     <div class="padding"></div>
1473
1474     <div class="entry">
1475       <div class="title">
1476         <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>
1477       </div>
1478       <div class="date">
1479         23rd July 2014
1480       </div>
1481       <div class="body">
1482         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
1483 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
1484 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
1485 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
1486 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
1487 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
1488 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
1489 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
1490 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
1491 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
1492 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
1493 the translation show this very well:</p>
1494
1495 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
1496
1497 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
1498 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
1499 project pages and the
1500 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
1501 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
1502 and HTML version available in the
1503 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
1504 directory</a>.</p>
1505
1506 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
1507 you find any.</p>
1508
1509       </div>
1510       <div class="tags">
1511
1512
1513         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>.
1514
1515
1516       </div>
1517     </div>
1518     <div class="padding"></div>
1519
1520     <div class="entry">
1521       <div class="title">
1522         <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>
1523       </div>
1524       <div class="date">
1525         17th June 2014
1526       </div>
1527       <div class="body">
1528         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1529 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
1530 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
1531 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
1532 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
1533
1534 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
1535 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
1536 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
1537 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
1538 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
1539 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
1540 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
1541 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
1542 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
1543 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
1544 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
1545 goals.</p>
1546
1547 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
1548 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
1549 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
1550 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
1551 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
1552 chapters together into one large web page (aka
1553 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
1554 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
1555 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
1556 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
1557 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
1558 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
1559 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
1560 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
1561 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
1562 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
1563 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
1564 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
1565 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
1566 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
1567 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
1568 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
1569 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
1570 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
1571
1572 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
1573 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
1574 track the English original.  For this we use the
1575 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
1576 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
1577 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
1578 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
1579 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
1580 files), which the translations update with the native language
1581 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
1582 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
1583 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
1584 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
1585 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
1586 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
1587 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
1588 of the documentation.</p>
1589
1590 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
1591 recommend using
1592 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
1593 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
1594 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
1595 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
1596 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
1597 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
1598 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
1599 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
1600
1601 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
1602 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
1603 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
1604 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
1605 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
1606 translated images by storing translated versions in
1607 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
1608 package maintainers know more.</p>
1609
1610 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
1611 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
1612 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
1613 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
1614 PDF version</a> or the
1615 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
1616 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
1617 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
1618
1619 <p>To learn more, check out
1620 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
1621 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
1622 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
1623 manual on the wiki</a> and
1624 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
1625 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
1626
1627       </div>
1628       <div class="tags">
1629
1630
1631         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
1632
1633
1634       </div>
1635     </div>
1636     <div class="padding"></div>
1637
1638     <div class="entry">
1639       <div class="title">
1640         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
1641       </div>
1642       <div class="date">
1643         29th May 2014
1644       </div>
1645       <div class="body">
1646         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
1647 in my car, connected to
1648 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
1649 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
1650 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
1651 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
1652 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
1653 such car computer.</p>
1654
1655 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
1656
1657 <ul>
1658
1659  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
1660
1661  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
1662    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
1663    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
1664    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
1665    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
1666
1667  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
1668    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
1669    route.</li>
1670
1671  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
1672
1673  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
1674    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
1675    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
1676    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
1677    connection do not work.</li>
1678
1679  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
1680    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
1681
1682  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
1683    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
1684
1685  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
1686    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
1687
1688 </ul>
1689
1690 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
1691 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
1692
1693       </div>
1694       <div class="tags">
1695
1696
1697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1698
1699
1700       </div>
1701     </div>
1702     <div class="padding"></div>
1703
1704     <div class="entry">
1705       <div class="title">
1706         <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>
1707       </div>
1708       <div class="date">
1709         29th April 2014
1710       </div>
1711       <div class="body">
1712         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
1713 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
1714 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
1715 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
1716 newer AVM2 format - see
1717 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
1718 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
1719 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
1720 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
1721 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
1722 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
1723 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
1724 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
1725 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
1726 sites do not work yet.</p>
1727
1728 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
1729 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
1730 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
1731 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
1732 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
1733 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
1734 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
1735 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
1736 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
1737 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
1738 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
1739
1740 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
1741 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
1742 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
1743 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
1744 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
1745 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
1746 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
1747
1748 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
1749 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
1750 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
1751 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
1752 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
1753
1754       </div>
1755       <div class="tags">
1756
1757
1758         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>.
1759
1760
1761       </div>
1762     </div>
1763     <div class="padding"></div>
1764
1765     <div class="entry">
1766       <div class="title">
1767         <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>
1768       </div>
1769       <div class="date">
1770         23rd April 2014
1771       </div>
1772       <div class="body">
1773         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
1774 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
1775 So I implemented one, using
1776 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
1777 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
1778 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
1779 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
1780 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
1781 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
1782
1783 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
1784 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
1785 packages to install.  The first part is in
1786 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
1787 this:</p>
1788
1789 <p><blockquote><pre>
1790 Task: isenkram
1791 Section: hardware
1792 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1793  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
1794  proposed.
1795 Test-new-install: mark show
1796 Relevance: 8
1797 Packages: for-current-hardware
1798 </pre></blockquote></p>
1799
1800 <p>The second part is in
1801 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
1802 this:</p>
1803
1804 <p><blockquote><pre>
1805 #!/bin/sh
1806 #
1807 (
1808     isenkram-lookup
1809     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1810 ) | sort -u
1811 </pre></blockquote></p>
1812
1813 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
1814 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
1815 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
1816 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
1817 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
1818 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
1819
1820 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
1821 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
1822 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
1823 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
1824 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
1825 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
1826 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
1827 the python-apt code (bug
1828 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
1829 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
1830 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
1831 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
1832 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
1833 unstable today.</p>
1834
1835 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
1836 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
1837 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
1838 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
1839 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
1840 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
1841 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
1842 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
1843 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
1844
1845 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
1846 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
1847 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
1848 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
1849 package.  See also
1850 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
1851 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
1852 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
1853 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
1854
1855       </div>
1856       <div class="tags">
1857
1858
1859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
1860
1861
1862       </div>
1863     </div>
1864     <div class="padding"></div>
1865
1866     <div class="entry">
1867       <div class="title">
1868         <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>
1869       </div>
1870       <div class="date">
1871         15th April 2014
1872       </div>
1873       <div class="body">
1874         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
1875 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
1876 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
1877 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
1878 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
1879 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
1880
1881 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
1882 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
1883 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
1884 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
1885 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
1886 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
1887 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
1888
1889 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
1890 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
1891 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
1892 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
1893 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
1894 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
1895 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
1896 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
1897 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
1898 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
1899 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
1900 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
1901
1902 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
1903 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
1904 become root:</p>
1905
1906 <p><pre>
1907 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
1908   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
1909   u-boot-tools
1910 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
1911   freedom-maker
1912 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
1913 </pre></p>
1914
1915 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
1916 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
1917 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
1918 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
1919 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
1920 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
1921 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
1922 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
1923
1924 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
1925 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
1926 the preseed values:</p>
1927
1928 <p><pre>
1929 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
1930 </pre></p>
1931
1932 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
1933 it still work.</p>
1934
1935 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
1936 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
1937 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
1938 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
1939 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
1940 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
1941 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
1942
1943 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
1944 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
1945 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
1946 irc.debian.org)</a> and
1947 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
1948 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
1949
1950       </div>
1951       <div class="tags">
1952
1953
1954         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
1955
1956
1957       </div>
1958     </div>
1959     <div class="padding"></div>
1960
1961     <div class="entry">
1962       <div class="title">
1963         <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>
1964       </div>
1965       <div class="date">
1966          9th April 2014
1967       </div>
1968       <div class="body">
1969         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
1970 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
1971 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
1972 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
1973 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
1974 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
1975 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
1976 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
1977 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
1978 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
1979 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
1980 have looked at a system called
1981 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
1982 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
1983
1984 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
1985 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
1986 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
1987 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
1988 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
1989 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
1990 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
1991 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
1992 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
1993 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
1994 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
1995 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
1996 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
1997
1998 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
1999 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
2000 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
2001 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
2002 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
2003 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
2004 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
2005 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
2006 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
2007 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
2008 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
2009 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
2010 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
2011 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
2012 account.</p>
2013
2014 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
2015 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
2016 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
2017 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
2018 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
2019 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
2020 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
2021
2022 <p><blockquote><pre>
2023 [s3c]
2024 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2025 backend-login: API-login
2026 backend-password: API-password
2027 fs-passphrase: local-password
2028 </pre></blockquote></p>
2029
2030 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
2031 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
2032 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
2033 details and password to create it:</p>
2034
2035 <p><blockquote><pre>
2036 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
2037 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2038   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2039 Enter backend login:
2040 Enter backend password:
2041 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
2042 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
2043 Enter encryption password:
2044 Confirm encryption password:
2045 Generating random encryption key...
2046 Creating metadata tables...
2047 Dumping metadata...
2048 ..objects..
2049 ..blocks..
2050 ..inodes..
2051 ..inode_blocks..
2052 ..symlink_targets..
2053 ..names..
2054 ..contents..
2055 ..ext_attributes..
2056 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2057 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
2058 # </pre></blockquote></p>
2059
2060 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
2061
2062 <p><blockquote><pre>
2063 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2064   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2065 Using 4 upload threads.
2066 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
2067 Reading metadata...
2068 ..objects..
2069 ..blocks..
2070 ..inodes..
2071 ..inode_blocks..
2072 ..symlink_targets..
2073 ..names..
2074 ..contents..
2075 ..ext_attributes..
2076 Mounting filesystem...
2077 # df -h /s3ql
2078 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
2079 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
2080 #
2081 </pre></blockquote></p>
2082
2083 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
2084 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
2085 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
2086 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
2087 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
2088 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
2089
2090 <p><blockquote><pre>
2091 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
2092 #
2093 </pre></blockquote></p>
2094
2095 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
2096 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
2097 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
2098 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
2099 file system:</p>
2100
2101 <p><blockquote><pre>
2102 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2103 Using cached metadata.
2104 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
2105 Checking DB integrity...
2106 Creating temporary extra indices...
2107 Checking lost+found...
2108 Checking cached objects...
2109 Checking names (refcounts)...
2110 Checking contents (names)...
2111 Checking contents (inodes)...
2112 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
2113 Checking objects (reference counts)...
2114 Checking objects (backend)...
2115 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
2116 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
2117 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
2118 Checking objects (sizes)...
2119 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
2120 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
2121 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
2122 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
2123 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
2124 Checking inodes (sizes)...
2125 Checking extended attributes (names)...
2126 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
2127 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
2128 Checking directory reachability...
2129 Checking unix conventions...
2130 Checking referential integrity...
2131 Dropping temporary indices...
2132 Backing up old metadata...
2133 Dumping metadata...
2134 ..objects..
2135 ..blocks..
2136 ..inodes..
2137 ..inode_blocks..
2138 ..symlink_targets..
2139 ..names..
2140 ..contents..
2141 ..ext_attributes..
2142 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2143 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
2144 #
2145 </pre></blockquote></p>
2146
2147 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
2148 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
2149 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
2150 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
2151 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
2152 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
2153 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
2154 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
2155 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
2156 working set.</p>
2157
2158 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
2159 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
2160 busy:</p>
2161
2162 <p><blockquote><pre>
2163 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2164   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2165 Using 8 upload threads.
2166 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
2167 #
2168 </pre></blockquote></p>
2169
2170 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
2171 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
2172 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
2173 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
2174 s3qlctrl:
2175
2176 <p><blockquote><pre>
2177 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
2178 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
2179 #
2180 </pre></blockquote></p>
2181
2182 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
2183 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
2184 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
2185 a report:</p>
2186
2187 <p><blockquote><pre>
2188 # s3qlstat /s3ql
2189 Directory entries:    9141
2190 Inodes:               9143
2191 Data blocks:          8851
2192 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
2193 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
2194 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
2195 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
2196 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
2197 #
2198 </pre></blockquote></p>
2199
2200 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
2201 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
2202 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
2203 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
2204 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
2205 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
2206 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
2207 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
2208 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
2209 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
2210 best.</p>
2211
2212 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
2213 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
2214 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
2215 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
2216 poster is titled
2217 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
2218 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
2219 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
2220 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
2221 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
2222
2223 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
2224 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
2225 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
2226 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
2227 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
2228 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
2229 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
2230 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
2231
2232 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
2233 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
2234 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
2235 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
2236 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
2237 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
2238 only read from it.</p>
2239
2240 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2241 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2242 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2243
2244       </div>
2245       <div class="tags">
2246
2247
2248         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
2249
2250
2251       </div>
2252     </div>
2253     <div class="padding"></div>
2254
2255     <div class="entry">
2256       <div class="title">
2257         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
2258       </div>
2259       <div class="date">
2260          1st April 2014
2261       </div>
2262       <div class="body">
2263         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
2264 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
2265 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
2266 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
2267 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
2268 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
2269 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
2270 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
2271 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
2272 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
2273 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
2274 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
2275 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
2276
2277 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
2278 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
2279 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
2280 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
2281 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
2282 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
2283 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
2284 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
2285 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
2286 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
2287 Linux.</p>
2288
2289 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
2290 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
2291 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
2292 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
2293 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
2294 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
2295 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
2296 Windows before metro).</p>
2297
2298 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
2299 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
2300 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
2301 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
2302 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
2303 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
2304 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
2305 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
2306 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
2307 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
2308 old Windows binaries, check it out by
2309 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
2310 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
2311 image.</p>
2312
2313       </div>
2314       <div class="tags">
2315
2316
2317         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
2318
2319
2320       </div>
2321     </div>
2322     <div class="padding"></div>
2323
2324     <div class="entry">
2325       <div class="title">
2326         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
2327       </div>
2328       <div class="date">
2329         30th March 2014
2330       </div>
2331       <div class="body">
2332         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
2333 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
2334 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
2335 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
2336 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
2337
2338 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2339
2340 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
2341 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
2342 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
2343 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
2344 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
2345
2346 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
2347 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
2348 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
2349
2350 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
2351 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
2352 hunger.</p>
2353
2354 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2355 project?</strong></p>
2356
2357 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
2358 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
2359 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
2360 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
2361 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
2362 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
2363 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
2364 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
2365 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
2366 running.  I just loved it.</p>
2367
2368 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2369 Edu?</strong></p>
2370
2371 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
2372 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
2373 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
2374 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
2375 be made of steel.</p>
2376
2377 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2378 Edu?</strong></p>
2379
2380 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
2381
2382 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
2383 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
2384 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
2385 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
2386 or dropped.</p>
2387
2388 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
2389 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
2390 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
2391 discourage many people too.</p>
2392
2393 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2394
2395 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
2396 Virtualbox.</p>
2397
2398
2399 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2400 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2401
2402 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
2403 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
2404 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
2405 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
2406 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
2407 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
2408 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
2409 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
2410 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
2411
2412       </div>
2413       <div class="tags">
2414
2415
2416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
2417
2418
2419       </div>
2420     </div>
2421     <div class="padding"></div>
2422
2423     <div class="entry">
2424       <div class="title">
2425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
2426       </div>
2427       <div class="date">
2428         25th March 2014
2429       </div>
2430       <div class="body">
2431         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
2432 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
2433 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
2434 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
2435 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
2436 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
2437 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
2438 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
2439 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
2440
2441 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
2442 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
2443 looked a given way.  Such
2444 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
2445 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
2446 called a
2447 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
2448 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
2449 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
2450 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
2451 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
2452 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
2453 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
2454 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
2455 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
2456 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
2457 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
2458 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
2459 There are several commercial services around providing such
2460 timestamping.  A quick search for
2461 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
2462 service</a>" pointed me to at least
2463 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
2464 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
2465 Vadis</a>,
2466 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
2467 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
2468 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
2469 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
2470
2471 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
2472 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
2473 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
2474 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
2475 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
2476 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
2477 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
2478 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
2479 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
2480 Greifswald.</p>
2481
2482 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
2483 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
2484 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
2485 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
2486 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
2487
2488 <p><blockquote><pre>
2489 #!/bin/sh
2490 set -e
2491 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
2492 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
2493 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
2494 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
2495 cafile=chain.txt
2496 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
2497     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
2498 fi
2499 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
2500     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
2501 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
2502 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
2503 base64 < "$resfile"
2504 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
2505 </pre></blockquote></p>
2506
2507 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
2508 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
2509 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
2510 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
2511 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
2512 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
2513 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
2514 changed.</p>
2515
2516 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
2517 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
2518 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
2519 to set up?</p>
2520
2521       </div>
2522       <div class="tags">
2523
2524
2525         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>.
2526
2527
2528       </div>
2529     </div>
2530     <div class="padding"></div>
2531
2532     <div class="entry">
2533       <div class="title">
2534         <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>
2535       </div>
2536       <div class="date">
2537         21st March 2014
2538       </div>
2539       <div class="body">
2540         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
2541 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
2542 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
2543 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
2544 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
2545 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
2546 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
2547
2548 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
2549 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
2550 tried using
2551 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
2552 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
2553 and program
2554 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
2555 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
2556 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
2557 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
2558 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
2559 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
2560 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
2561 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
2562 this method.</p>
2563
2564 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
2565 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
2566 problem is
2567 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
2568 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
2569 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
2570 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
2571 DVD structures, as the python library
2572 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
2573 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
2574 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
2575 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
2576 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
2577 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
2578
2579 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
2580 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
2581
2582       </div>
2583       <div class="tags">
2584
2585
2586         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2587
2588
2589       </div>
2590     </div>
2591     <div class="padding"></div>
2592
2593     <div class="entry">
2594       <div class="title">
2595         <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>
2596       </div>
2597       <div class="date">
2598         14th March 2014
2599       </div>
2600       <div class="body">
2601         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2602 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
2603 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
2604 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
2605 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
2606 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
2607 release (0.2).</p>
2608
2609 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
2610 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
2611 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
2612 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
2613 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
2614 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
2615 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
2616 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
2617 and build using
2618 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
2619 with a user with sudo access to become root:
2620
2621 <pre>
2622 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2623   freedom-maker
2624 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2625   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2626   u-boot-tools
2627 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2628 </pre>
2629
2630 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2631 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
2632 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
2633 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
2634 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
2635 kpartx call.</p>
2636
2637 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2638 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2639 the preseed values:</p>
2640
2641 <pre>
2642 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2643 </pre>
2644
2645 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
2646 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
2647 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
2648 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
2649 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
2650 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
2651
2652 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2653 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2654 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2655 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2656 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2657 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2658
2659       </div>
2660       <div class="tags">
2661
2662
2663         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
2664
2665
2666       </div>
2667     </div>
2668     <div class="padding"></div>
2669
2670     <div class="entry">
2671       <div class="title">
2672         <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>
2673       </div>
2674       <div class="date">
2675         12th March 2014
2676       </div>
2677       <div class="body">
2678         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
2679 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
2680 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
2681 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
2682 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
2683 document this better when one of the customers of
2684 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
2685 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
2686 get this working are the following:</p>
2687
2688 <p><ol>
2689
2690 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
2691 example host here.</li>
2692
2693 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
2694 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
2695
2696 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
2697 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
2698
2699 </ol></p>
2700
2701 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
2702 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
2703 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
2704 started).</p>
2705
2706 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
2707 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
2708
2709 <p><blockquote><pre>
2710 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
2711 Export list for nas-server:
2712 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
2713 root@tjener:~#
2714 </pre></blockquote></p>
2715
2716 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
2717 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
2718 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
2719 NFS access.</p>
2720
2721 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
2722 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
2723 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
2724
2725 <p><blockquote><pre>
2726 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2727 </pre></blockquote></p>
2728
2729 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
2730 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
2731 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
2732 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
2733
2734 <p><blockquote><pre>
2735 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2736 objectClass: automount
2737 cn: nas-server
2738 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2739
2740 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2741 objectClass: top
2742 objectClass: automountMap
2743 ou: auto.nas-server
2744
2745 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2746 objectClass: automount
2747 cn: /
2748 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
2749 </pre></blockquote></p>
2750
2751 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
2752 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
2753 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
2754
2755 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
2756 the storage server directly by just visiting the
2757 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
2758 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
2759
2760       </div>
2761       <div class="tags">
2762
2763
2764         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
2765
2766
2767       </div>
2768     </div>
2769     <div class="padding"></div>
2770
2771     <div class="entry">
2772       <div class="title">
2773         <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>
2774       </div>
2775       <div class="date">
2776         22nd February 2014
2777       </div>
2778       <div class="body">
2779         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
2780 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
2781 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
2782 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
2783 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
2784 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
2785 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
2786 proper home since then.</p>
2787
2788 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
2789 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
2790 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
2791 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
2792 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
2793
2794 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
2795 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
2796 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
2797 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
2798 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
2799 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
2800 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
2801 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
2802 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
2803
2804       </div>
2805       <div class="tags">
2806
2807
2808         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2809
2810
2811       </div>
2812     </div>
2813     <div class="padding"></div>
2814
2815     <div class="entry">
2816       <div class="title">
2817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
2818       </div>
2819       <div class="date">
2820          3rd February 2014
2821       </div>
2822       <div class="body">
2823         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
2824 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
2825 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
2826 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
2827 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
2828 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
2829 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
2830 <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>,
2831 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
2832
2833 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
2834 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
2835 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
2836 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
2837 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
2838 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
2839
2840 <p><blockquote><pre>
2841 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
2842 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
2843 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
2844 dhclient /dev/eth0
2845 </pre></blockquote></p>
2846
2847 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
2848 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
2849 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
2850
2851 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
2852 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
2853 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
2854 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
2855 side.</p>
2856
2857 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
2858 stuff:</p>
2859
2860 <p><blockquote><pre>
2861 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
2862 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
2863 EOF
2864 apt-get update
2865 apt-get dist-upgrade
2866 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
2867     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
2868 update-alternatives --config runsystem
2869 </pre></blockquote></p>
2870
2871 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
2872 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
2873 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
2874 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
2875 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
2876 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
2877 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
2878 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
2879 ssh instead.
2880
2881 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
2882 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
2883 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
2884 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
2885 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
2886 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
2887
2888 <p><blockquote><pre>
2889 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
2890 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
2891 EOF
2892 </pre></blockquote></p>
2893
2894 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
2895 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
2896 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
2897 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
2898
2899 <p><blockquote><pre>
2900 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
2901 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
2902 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
2903 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
2904 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
2905 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
2906 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
2907 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
2908 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
2909 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
2910 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
2911 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
2912 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
2913 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
2914 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
2915 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
2916 #
2917 </pre></blockquote></p>
2918
2919 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
2920 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
2921 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
2922 command line stuff.<p>
2923
2924       </div>
2925       <div class="tags">
2926
2927
2928         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>.
2929
2930
2931       </div>
2932     </div>
2933     <div class="padding"></div>
2934
2935     <div class="entry">
2936       <div class="title">
2937         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
2938       </div>
2939       <div class="date">
2940         29th January 2014
2941       </div>
2942       <div class="body">
2943         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
2944 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
2945 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
2946 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
2947 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
2948 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
2949 investigated in
2950 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
2951 from December 2013, in the article
2952 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
2953 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
2954 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
2955 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
2956 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
2957 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
2958 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
2959 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
2960
2961 <p><blockquote>
2962 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
2963 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
2964 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
2965 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
2966 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
2967 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
2968 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
2969 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
2970 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
2971 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
2972 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
2973 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
2974
2975 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
2976 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
2977 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
2978 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
2979 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
2980 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
2981 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
2982 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
2983 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
2984 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
2985 </blockquote><p>
2986
2987 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
2988 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
2989 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
2990 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
2991 summarized like this:</p>
2992
2993 <p><blockquote>
2994 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
2995 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
2996 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
2997 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
2998 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
2999 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
3000 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
3001 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
3002 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
3003 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
3004 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
3005 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
3006 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
3007 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
3008 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
3009 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
3010 </blockquote></p>
3011
3012 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
3013 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
3014 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
3015 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
3016
3017 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3018 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3019 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3020
3021       </div>
3022       <div class="tags">
3023
3024
3025         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>.
3026
3027
3028       </div>
3029     </div>
3030     <div class="padding"></div>
3031
3032     <div class="entry">
3033       <div class="title">
3034         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3035       </div>
3036       <div class="date">
3037         14th January 2014
3038       </div>
3039       <div class="body">
3040         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3041 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3042 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3043 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3044 the source.  The company behind it provide
3045 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3046 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3047 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3048 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3049 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3050 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3051 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3052 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3053 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3054 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3055 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3056 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3057 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3058 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3059 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3060 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
3061 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
3062 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
3063 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
3064
3065 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
3066
3067 <ul>
3068
3069   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
3070   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
3071   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
3072
3073 </ul>
3074
3075 <p>You can
3076 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3077 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3078 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3079 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3080 include a test suite check.</p>
3081
3082       </div>
3083       <div class="tags">
3084
3085
3086         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>.
3087
3088
3089       </div>
3090     </div>
3091     <div class="padding"></div>
3092
3093     <div class="entry">
3094       <div class="title">
3095         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
3096       </div>
3097       <div class="date">
3098         25th December 2013
3099       </div>
3100       <div class="body">
3101         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3102 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
3103 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
3104 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
3105 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
3106 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
3107 George</a>.</p>
3108
3109 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
3110
3111 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3112
3113 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
3114 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
3115 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
3116 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
3117 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
3118 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
3119
3120 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
3121 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
3122 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
3123 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
3124 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
3125 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
3126 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
3127 to help building another school's informational education concept from
3128 scratch.</p>
3129
3130 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
3131 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
3132 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
3133
3134 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
3135 and cycling.</p>
3136
3137 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3138 project?</strong></p>
3139
3140 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
3141 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
3142 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
3143 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
3144 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
3145 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
3146
3147 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
3148 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
3149 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
3150 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
3151 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
3152 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
3153 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
3154 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
3155 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
3156
3157 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
3158 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
3159 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
3160 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
3161
3162 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3163 Edu?</strong></p>
3164
3165 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
3166 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
3167 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
3168 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
3169 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
3170 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
3171 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
3172 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
3173 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
3174 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
3175 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
3176 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
3177 that it rocks!</p>
3178
3179 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
3180 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
3181 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
3182 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
3183 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
3184 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
3185 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
3186
3187 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3188 Edu?</strong></p>
3189
3190 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
3191 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
3192 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
3193 can list a few points about that:</p>
3194
3195 <ul>
3196
3197  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
3198  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
3199  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
3200
3201 </ul>
3202
3203 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
3204
3205 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3206
3207 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
3208 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
3209 year.</p>
3210
3211 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
3212 run text tools. I use
3213 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
3214 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
3215 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
3216 based full-featured student management software with the two),
3217 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
3218 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
3219 coloured world called the WWW, I use
3220 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
3221 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
3222 e-mail.</p>
3223
3224 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
3225 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
3226 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
3227 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
3228 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
3229 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
3230 Facebook now ;).</p>
3231
3232 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3233 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3234
3235 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
3236 side is what I have experienced.</p>
3237
3238 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
3239 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
3240 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
3241 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
3242 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
3243 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
3244 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
3245 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
3246 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
3247 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
3248 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
3249 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
3250 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
3251 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
3252 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
3253 plain criminal.</p>
3254
3255 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
3256 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
3257 founded an association named
3258 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
3259 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
3260 area of free and open source software, for example the
3261 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
3262 Teckids and are the youth programme of
3263 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
3264 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
3265 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
3266 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
3267 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
3268 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
3269
3270 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
3271 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
3272 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
3273 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
3274 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
3275 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
3276 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
3277 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
3278 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
3279 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
3280 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
3281 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
3282
3283 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
3284 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
3285 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
3286 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
3287
3288 <!--
3289
3290 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
3291
3292 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
3293 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
3294
3295  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
3296    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
3297    of the decision makers above;
3298  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
3299    knowledge about free software
3300
3301 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
3302
3303 -->
3304
3305       </div>
3306       <div class="tags">
3307
3308
3309         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
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_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
3319       </div>
3320       <div class="date">
3321          6th December 2013
3322       </div>
3323       <div class="body">
3324         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
3325 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3326 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
3327 had a new school administrator show up on
3328 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
3329 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
3330 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
3331 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
3332 Germany a few years ago.</p>
3333
3334 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3335
3336 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
3337 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
3338 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
3339 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
3340
3341 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
3342 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
3343 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
3344 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
3345 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
3346 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
3347 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
3348 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
3349 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
3350
3351 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3352 project?</strong></p>
3353
3354 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
3355 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
3356 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
3357 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
3358
3359 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3360 Edu?</strong></p>
3361
3362 <ul>
3363   <li>Quick installation,</li>
3364   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
3365   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
3366   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
3367     single company,</li>
3368   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
3369     experience and problem solutions.</li>
3370 </ul>
3371
3372 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3373 Edu?</strong></p>
3374
3375 <ul>
3376   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
3377   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
3378   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
3379   working again reliably.
3380
3381   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
3382   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
3383   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
3384   as their base.
3385
3386   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
3387   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
3388   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
3389   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
3390   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
3391   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
3392
3393   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
3394   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
3395   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
3396   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
3397   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
3398   schemes.</li>
3399
3400   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
3401   compared to Debian.</li>
3402
3403 </ul>
3404
3405 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
3406 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
3407 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
3408 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
3409
3410 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3411
3412 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
3413 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
3414 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
3415 programming languages for teaching.</p>
3416
3417 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3418 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3419
3420 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
3421
3422 <ul>
3423
3424   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
3425     teaching and learning.</li>
3426
3427   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
3428     home, and at their working place without running into license or
3429     conversion problems.</li>
3430
3431   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
3432     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
3433     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
3434     science, not products.</li>
3435
3436   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
3437     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
3438
3439 </ul>
3440
3441       </div>
3442       <div class="tags">
3443
3444
3445         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
3446
3447
3448       </div>
3449     </div>
3450     <div class="padding"></div>
3451
3452     <div class="entry">
3453       <div class="title">
3454         <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>
3455       </div>
3456       <div class="date">
3457         30th November 2013
3458       </div>
3459       <div class="body">
3460         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
3461 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
3462 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
3463 experiment with interesting network technology, the
3464 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
3465 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
3466 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
3467 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
3468 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
3469 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
3470 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
3471 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
3472 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
3473 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
3474 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
3475 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
3476 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
3477 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
3478 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
3479 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
3480
3481       </div>
3482       <div class="tags">
3483
3484
3485         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>.
3486
3487
3488       </div>
3489     </div>
3490     <div class="padding"></div>
3491
3492     <div class="entry">
3493       <div class="title">
3494         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
3495       </div>
3496       <div class="date">
3497         24th November 2013
3498       </div>
3499       <div class="body">
3500         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
3501 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
3502 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
3503 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
3504 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
3505 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
3506 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
3507 is working on.  I checked the
3508 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
3509 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
3510 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
3511 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
3512 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
3513 These are the release notes:</p>
3514
3515 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
3516
3517 <ul>
3518
3519   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
3520    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
3521    up.</li>
3522
3523   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
3524
3525   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
3526    Matthias Klose.</li>
3527
3528   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
3529    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
3530
3531   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
3532    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
3533    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
3534
3535 </ul>
3536
3537 <p>You can
3538 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3539 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3540 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3541 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3542 include a testsuite check.</p>
3543
3544       </div>
3545       <div class="tags">
3546
3547
3548         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>.
3549
3550
3551       </div>
3552     </div>
3553     <div class="padding"></div>
3554
3555     <div class="entry">
3556       <div class="title">
3557         <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>
3558       </div>
3559       <div class="date">
3560         21st November 2013
3561       </div>
3562       <div class="body">
3563         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
3564 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
3565 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
3566 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
3567 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
3568 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
3569 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
3570 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
3571 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
3572 TED talk
3573 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
3574 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
3575 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
3576
3577 <blockquote>
3578
3579 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
3580 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
3581 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
3582 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
3583 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
3584 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
3585 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
3586 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
3587 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
3588 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
3589 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
3590
3591 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
3592 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
3593 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
3594
3595 </blockquote>
3596
3597 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
3598 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
3599 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
3600 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
3601 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
3602 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
3603 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
3604 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
3605 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
3606
3607       </div>
3608       <div class="tags">
3609
3610
3611         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>.
3612
3613
3614       </div>
3615     </div>
3616     <div class="padding"></div>
3617
3618     <div class="entry">
3619       <div class="title">
3620         <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>
3621       </div>
3622       <div class="date">
3623         13th November 2013
3624       </div>
3625       <div class="body">
3626         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
3627 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
3628 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
3629 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
3630 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
3631 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
3632 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
3633 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
3634 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
3635 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
3636 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
3637 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
3638 right away. :)</p>
3639
3640       </div>
3641       <div class="tags">
3642
3643
3644         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>.
3645
3646
3647       </div>
3648     </div>
3649     <div class="padding"></div>
3650
3651     <div class="entry">
3652       <div class="title">
3653         <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>
3654       </div>
3655       <div class="date">
3656         10th November 2013
3657       </div>
3658       <div class="body">
3659         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
3660 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
3661 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
3662 MR3040 as a mesh node using
3663 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
3664
3665 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
3666 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
3667 and downloaded
3668 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
3669 recommended firmware image</a>
3670 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
3671 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
3672 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
3673 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
3674 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
3675
3676 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
3677 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
3678 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
3679 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
3680 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
3681 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
3682 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
3683 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
3684 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
3685 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
3686 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
3687 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
3688 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
3689
3690 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
3691 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
3692 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
3693 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
3694 them:</p>
3695
3696 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
3697
3698 <pre>
3699
3700 config interface 'loopback'
3701         option ifname 'lo'
3702         option proto 'static'
3703         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
3704         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
3705
3706 config globals 'globals'
3707         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
3708
3709 config interface 'lan'
3710         option ifname 'eth0'
3711         option type 'bridge'
3712         option proto 'dhcp'
3713         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
3714         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
3715         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
3716         option ip6assign '60'
3717
3718 config interface 'mesh'
3719         option ifname 'adhoc0'
3720         option mtu '1528'
3721         option proto 'batadv'
3722         option mesh 'bat0'
3723 </pre>
3724
3725 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
3726 <pre>
3727
3728 config wifi-device 'radio0'
3729         option type 'mac80211'
3730         option channel '11'
3731         option hwmode '11ng'
3732         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
3733         option htmode 'HT20'
3734         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
3735         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
3736         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
3737         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
3738         option disabled '0'
3739
3740 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
3741         option device 'radio0'
3742         option ifname 'adhoc0'
3743         option network 'mesh'
3744         option encryption 'none'
3745         option mode 'adhoc'
3746         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
3747         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
3748 </pre>
3749 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
3750 <pre>
3751
3752 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
3753         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
3754         option 'aggregated_ogms'
3755         option 'ap_isolation'
3756         option 'bonding'
3757         option 'fragmentation'
3758         option 'gw_bandwidth'
3759         option 'gw_mode'
3760         option 'gw_sel_class'
3761         option 'log_level'
3762         option 'orig_interval'
3763         option 'vis_mode'
3764         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
3765         option 'distributed_arp_table'
3766         option 'network_coding'
3767         option 'hop_penalty'
3768
3769 # yet another batX instance
3770 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
3771 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
3772 </pre>
3773
3774 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
3775 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
3776 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
3777
3778       </div>
3779       <div class="tags">
3780
3781
3782         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>.
3783
3784
3785       </div>
3786     </div>
3787     <div class="padding"></div>
3788
3789     <div class="entry">
3790       <div class="title">
3791         <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>
3792       </div>
3793       <div class="date">
3794          2nd November 2013
3795       </div>
3796       <div class="body">
3797         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
3798 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
3799 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
3800 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
3801 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
3802
3803 <p><pre>
3804 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
3805 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
3806 # Provides:          rsyslog
3807 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
3808 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
3809 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
3810 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
3811 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
3812 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
3813 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
3814 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
3815 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
3816 ### END INIT INFO
3817 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
3818 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
3819 </pre></p>
3820
3821 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
3822 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
3823 info/comments.</p>
3824
3825 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
3826 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
3827
3828 <p><pre>
3829 #!/bin/sh
3830
3831 # Define LSB log_* functions.
3832 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
3833 # and status_of_proc is working.
3834 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
3835
3836 #
3837 # Function that starts the daemon/service
3838
3839 #
3840 do_start()
3841 {
3842         # Return
3843         #   0 if daemon has been started
3844         #   1 if daemon was already running
3845         #   2 if daemon could not be started
3846         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
3847                 || return 1
3848         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
3849                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
3850                 || return 2
3851         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
3852         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
3853         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
3854 }
3855
3856 #
3857 # Function that stops the daemon/service
3858 #
3859 do_stop()
3860 {
3861         # Return
3862         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
3863         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
3864         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
3865         #   other if a failure occurred
3866         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
3867         RETVAL="$?"
3868         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
3869         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
3870         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
3871         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
3872         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
3873         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
3874         # sleep for some time.
3875         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
3876         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
3877         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
3878         rm -f $PIDFILE
3879         return "$RETVAL"
3880 }
3881
3882 #
3883 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
3884 #
3885 do_reload() {
3886         #
3887         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
3888         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
3889         # then implement that here.
3890         #
3891         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
3892         return 0
3893 }
3894
3895 SCRIPTNAME=$1
3896 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
3897 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
3898 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
3899     script="$1"
3900     shift
3901     . $script
3902 else
3903     exit 0
3904 fi
3905
3906 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
3907 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
3908
3909 # Exit if the package is not installed
3910 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
3911
3912 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
3913 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
3914
3915 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
3916 . /lib/init/vars.sh
3917
3918 case "$1" in
3919   start)
3920         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
3921         do_start
3922         case "$?" in
3923                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
3924                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
3925         esac
3926         ;;
3927   stop)
3928         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
3929         do_stop
3930         case "$?" in
3931                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
3932                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
3933         esac
3934         ;;
3935   status)
3936         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
3937         ;;
3938   #reload|force-reload)
3939         #
3940         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
3941         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
3942         #
3943         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
3944         #do_reload
3945         #log_end_msg $?
3946         #;;
3947   restart|force-reload)
3948         #
3949         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
3950         # 'force-reload' alias
3951         #
3952         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
3953         do_stop
3954         case "$?" in
3955           0|1)
3956                 do_start
3957                 case "$?" in
3958                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
3959                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
3960                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
3961                 esac
3962                 ;;
3963           *)
3964                 # Failed to stop
3965                 log_end_msg 1
3966                 ;;
3967         esac
3968         ;;
3969   *)
3970         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
3971         exit 3
3972         ;;
3973 esac
3974
3975 :
3976 </pre></p>
3977
3978 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
3979 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
3980 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
3981 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
3982
3983 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
3984 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
3985 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
3986 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
3987 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
3988
3989       </div>
3990       <div class="tags">
3991
3992
3993         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>.
3994
3995
3996       </div>
3997     </div>
3998     <div class="padding"></div>
3999
4000     <div class="entry">
4001       <div class="title">
4002         <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>
4003       </div>
4004       <div class="date">
4005          1st November 2013
4006       </div>
4007       <div class="body">
4008         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
4009 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
4010 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
4011 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
4012 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
4013 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
4014 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
4015 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
4016 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
4017 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
4018 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
4019 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
4020
4021 <p>The source is now available from
4022 <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>
4023
4024       </div>
4025       <div class="tags">
4026
4027
4028         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4029
4030
4031       </div>
4032     </div>
4033     <div class="padding"></div>
4034
4035     <div class="entry">
4036       <div class="title">
4037         <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>
4038       </div>
4039       <div class="date">
4040         27th October 2013
4041       </div>
4042       <div class="body">
4043         <p>The
4044 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
4045 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
4046 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
4047 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
4048 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
4049 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
4050 of a plan to simplify the build system for
4051 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
4052 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
4053 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
4054 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
4055 Raspberry Pi.</p>
4056
4057 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
4058 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
4059 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
4060 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
4061 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
4062 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
4063 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
4064 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
4065 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
4066 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
4067 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
4068 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
4069 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
4070 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
4071 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
4072 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
4073 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
4074 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
4075 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
4076 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
4077 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
4078 available from
4079 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
4080 upstream project page</a>.</p>
4081
4082 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
4083 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
4084 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
4085 list:</p>
4086
4087 <p><pre>
4088 #!/bin/sh
4089 set -e # Exit on first error
4090 rootdir="$1"
4091 cd "$rootdir"
4092 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
4093 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
4094 EOF
4095 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
4096 # install a kernel somewhere too.
4097 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
4098     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4099 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4100 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
4101 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
4102 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
4103 </pre></p>
4104
4105 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
4106 to build the image:</p>
4107
4108 <pre>
4109 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
4110     --variant minbase \
4111     --arch armel \
4112     --distribution jessie \
4113     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
4114     --image test.img \
4115     --size 600M \
4116     --bootsize 64M \
4117     --boottype vfat \
4118     --log-level debug \
4119     --verbose \
4120     --no-kernel \
4121     --no-extlinux \
4122     --root-password raspberry \
4123     --hostname raspberrypi \
4124     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
4125     --customize `pwd`/customize \
4126     --package netbase \
4127     --package git-core \
4128     --package binutils \
4129     --package ca-certificates \
4130     --package wget \
4131     --package kmod
4132 </pre></p>
4133
4134 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
4135 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
4136 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
4137 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
4138 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
4139 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
4140 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
4141
4142 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
4143 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
4144 build dependency list.</p>
4145
4146 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
4147 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
4148 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
4149 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
4150
4151       </div>
4152       <div class="tags">
4153
4154
4155         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
4156
4157
4158       </div>
4159     </div>
4160     <div class="padding"></div>
4161
4162     <div class="entry">
4163       <div class="title">
4164         <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>
4165       </div>
4166       <div class="date">
4167         21st October 2013
4168       </div>
4169       <div class="body">
4170         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
4171 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
4172 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
4173 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
4174 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
4175 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
4176 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
4177 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
4178
4179 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
4180 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
4181 instead, I started playing with a
4182 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
4183 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
4184 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
4185 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
4186 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
4187 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
4188 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
4189 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
4190 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
4191 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
4192 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
4193 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
4194 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
4195 every client on the local network.</p>
4196
4197 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
4198 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
4199 and a script
4200 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
4201 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
4202 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
4203 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
4204 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
4205 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
4206 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
4207 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
4208 support.</p>
4209
4210 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
4211 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
4212
4213 <p><pre>
4214 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
4215     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
4216 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
4217 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
4218 %
4219 </pre></p>
4220
4221 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
4222 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
4223 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
4224 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
4225 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
4226 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
4227
4228 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
4229 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
4230 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
4231
4232 <p><table>
4233
4234 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
4235 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
4236 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
4237 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
4238 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
4239 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
4240
4241 </table></p>
4242
4243 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
4244 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
4245 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
4246 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
4247 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
4248 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
4249 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
4250
4251       </div>
4252       <div class="tags">
4253
4254
4255         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>.
4256
4257
4258       </div>
4259     </div>
4260     <div class="padding"></div>
4261
4262     <div class="entry">
4263       <div class="title">
4264         <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>
4265       </div>
4266       <div class="date">
4267         19th October 2013
4268       </div>
4269       <div class="body">
4270         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
4271 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
4272 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
4273 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
4274 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
4275 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
4276 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
4277 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
4278
4279       </div>
4280       <div class="tags">
4281
4282
4283         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>.
4284
4285
4286       </div>
4287     </div>
4288     <div class="padding"></div>
4289
4290     <div class="entry">
4291       <div class="title">
4292         <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>
4293       </div>
4294       <div class="date">
4295         15th October 2013
4296       </div>
4297       <div class="body">
4298         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
4299 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
4300 these. :)</p>
4301
4302 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
4303 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
4304 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
4305 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
4306 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
4307 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
4308 hope you will to. :)</p>
4309
4310 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
4311 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
4312 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
4313 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
4314 donated.  Are you next?</p>
4315
4316 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
4317 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
4318 statement under the heading
4319 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
4320 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
4321 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
4322 too.</p>
4323
4324       </div>
4325       <div class="tags">
4326
4327
4328         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
4329
4330
4331       </div>
4332     </div>
4333     <div class="padding"></div>
4334
4335     <div class="entry">
4336       <div class="title">
4337         <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>
4338       </div>
4339       <div class="date">
4340         11th October 2013
4341       </div>
4342       <div class="body">
4343         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
4344 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
4345 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
4346 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
4347 successful examples like
4348 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
4349 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
4350 (see
4351 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
4352 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
4353 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
4354 can be seen from their
4355 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
4356 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
4357 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
4358 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
4359 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
4360
4361 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
4362 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
4363 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
4364 my recent involvement in
4365 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
4366 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
4367 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
4368 when possible, given that most communication between people are
4369 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
4370 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
4371 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
4372 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
4373 important over the years.</p>
4374
4375 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
4376 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
4377 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
4378 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
4379 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
4380 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
4381 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
4382 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
4383 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
4384 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
4385 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
4386 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
4387 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
4388 speakers about this talk (from
4389 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
4390
4391 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
4392
4393 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
4394 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
4395 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
4396 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
4397 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
4398 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
4399 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
4400 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
4401 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
4402 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
4403 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
4404 that project (from
4405 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
4406
4407 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
4408
4409 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
4410 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
4411 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
4412 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
4413 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
4414 based community mesh networks.</p>
4415
4416 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
4417 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
4418 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
4419 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
4420 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
4421 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
4422 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
4423 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
4424 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
4425
4426 <p><table>
4427 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
4428 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
4429 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
4430 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
4431 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
4432 </table></p>
4433
4434 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
4435 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
4436 VillageTelco about
4437 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
4438 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
4439 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
4440 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
4441 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
4442 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
4443
4444 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
4445 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
4446 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
4447 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
4448
4449 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
4450 us on IRC, either channel
4451 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
4452 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
4453 irc.freenode.net.</p>
4454
4455 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
4456 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
4457 and Innovation called
4458 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
4459 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
4460 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
4461 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
4462 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
4463 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
4464 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
4465 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
4466
4467 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
4468 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
4469 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
4470 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
4471 mesh system.</p>
4472
4473       </div>
4474       <div class="tags">
4475
4476
4477         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>.
4478
4479
4480       </div>
4481     </div>
4482     <div class="padding"></div>
4483
4484     <div class="entry">
4485       <div class="title">
4486         <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>
4487       </div>
4488       <div class="date">
4489          8th October 2013
4490       </div>
4491       <div class="body">
4492         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
4493 Salvador had published a
4494 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
4495 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
4496 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
4497 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
4498 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
4499 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
4500 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
4501 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
4502 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
4503 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
4504 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
4505 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
4506 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
4507 computers without hard drives by installing one central
4508 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
4509
4510 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
4511
4512 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
4513
4514 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
4515 me know. :)</p>
4516
4517       </div>
4518       <div class="tags">
4519
4520
4521         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
4522
4523
4524       </div>
4525     </div>
4526     <div class="padding"></div>
4527
4528     <div class="entry">
4529       <div class="title">
4530         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
4531       </div>
4532       <div class="date">
4533         29th September 2013
4534       </div>
4535       <div class="body">
4536         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
4537 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
4538 complete announcement text can be found at
4539 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
4540 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
4541
4542 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
4543 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
4544 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
4545 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
4546
4547       </div>
4548       <div class="tags">
4549
4550
4551         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4552
4553
4554       </div>
4555     </div>
4556     <div class="padding"></div>
4557
4558     <div class="entry">
4559       <div class="title">
4560         <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>
4561       </div>
4562       <div class="date">
4563         27th September 2013
4564       </div>
4565       <div class="body">
4566         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
4567 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
4568 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
4569 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
4570
4571 <ul>
4572
4573 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
4574 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
4575
4576 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
4577 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4578
4579 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
4580 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
4581 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
4582 (Youtube)</li>
4583
4584 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
4585 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
4586
4587 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
4588 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4589
4590 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
4591 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
4592 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
4593
4594 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
4595 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
4596 (Youtube)</li>
4597
4598 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
4599 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
4600
4601 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
4602 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
4603
4604 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
4605 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
4606 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
4607
4608 </ul>
4609
4610 <p>A larger list is available from
4611 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
4612 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
4613
4614 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
4615 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
4616 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
4617 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
4618 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
4619 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
4620 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
4621 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
4622 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
4623 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
4624 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
4625
4626       </div>
4627       <div class="tags">
4628
4629
4630         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
4631
4632
4633       </div>
4634     </div>
4635     <div class="padding"></div>
4636
4637     <div class="entry">
4638       <div class="title">
4639         <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>
4640       </div>
4641       <div class="date">
4642         16th September 2013
4643       </div>
4644       <div class="body">
4645         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
4646 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
4647
4648 <blockquote>
4649 <p>Hi,</p>
4650
4651 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
4652 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
4653 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
4654
4655 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
4656 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
4657 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
4658 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
4659
4660 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
4661 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
4662
4663 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
4664 compared to beta1:</p>
4665
4666 <ul>
4667
4668 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
4669 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
4670 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
4671 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
4672 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
4673 main server.</li>
4674 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
4675 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
4676 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
4677 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
4678 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
4679
4680 </ul>
4681
4682 <p>Where to get it:</p>
4683
4684 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
4685
4686 <ul>
4687 <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>
4688 <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>
4689 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
4690 </ul>
4691
4692 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
4693
4694 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
4695 <ul>
4696 <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>
4697 <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>
4698 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
4699 </ul>
4700
4701 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
4702
4703 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
4704 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
4705 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
4706 as the other isos.</p>
4707
4708 <p>How to report bugs</p>
4709
4710 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
4711 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
4712
4713
4714 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
4715
4716 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
4717 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4718 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
4719 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4720 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4721 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4722 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
4723 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
4724 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
4725 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
4726 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
4727 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
4728 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
4729
4730 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
4731 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
4732 Squeeze release.</p>
4733
4734 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
4735
4736 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
4737 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
4738 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
4739 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
4740 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
4741 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
4742 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
4743 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
4744 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
4745 directory.</p>
4746
4747
4748 <p>cheers,
4749 <br>        Holger</p>
4750 </blockquote>
4751
4752       </div>
4753       <div class="tags">
4754
4755
4756         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4757
4758
4759       </div>
4760     </div>
4761     <div class="padding"></div>
4762
4763     <div class="entry">
4764       <div class="title">
4765         <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>
4766       </div>
4767       <div class="date">
4768         10th September 2013
4769       </div>
4770       <div class="body">
4771         <p>I was introduced to the
4772 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
4773 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
4774 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
4775 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
4776 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
4777 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
4778 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
4779 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
4780
4781 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
4782 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
4783 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
4784 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
4785 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
4786
4787 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
4788 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
4789 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
4790 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
4791 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
4792 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
4793 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
4794 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
4795 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
4796 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
4797 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
4798 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
4799 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
4800 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
4801 missing in Debian).</p>
4802
4803 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
4804 scripts
4805 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
4806 and a administrative web interface
4807 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
4808 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
4809 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
4810 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
4811 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
4812 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
4813 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
4814 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
4815 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
4816 this is really working yet, see
4817 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
4818 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
4819 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
4820 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
4821 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
4822 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
4823 with lots of half baked features.</p>
4824
4825 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
4826 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
4827 at.</p>
4828
4829 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
4830
4831 <ol>
4832
4833 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
4834 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
4835 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
4836 to the Debian installer:<p>
4837 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
4838
4839 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
4840 install on.</li>
4841
4842 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
4843 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
4844
4845 </ol>
4846
4847 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
4848
4849 <ol>
4850
4851 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
4852 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
4853 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
4854 <pre>
4855 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
4856 </pre></li>
4857 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
4858 <pre>
4859 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
4860    apt-key add -
4861 apt-get update
4862 apt-get install freedombox-setup
4863 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
4864 </pre></li>
4865 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
4866
4867 </ol>
4868
4869 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
4870 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
4871 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
4872 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
4873 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
4874
4875 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
4876 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
4877 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
4878 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
4879
4880 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
4881 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
4882 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
4883 irc.debian.org and the
4884 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
4885 mailing list</a>.</p>
4886
4887 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
4888 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
4889 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
4890 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
4891 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
4892 default password is 'secret'.</p>
4893
4894       </div>
4895       <div class="tags">
4896
4897
4898         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
4899
4900
4901       </div>
4902     </div>
4903     <div class="padding"></div>
4904
4905     <div class="entry">
4906       <div class="title">
4907         <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>
4908       </div>
4909       <div class="date">
4910         22nd August 2013
4911       </div>
4912       <div class="body">
4913         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
4914 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
4915 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
4916
4917 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
4918
4919 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4920 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
4921
4922 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
4923
4924 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
4925 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
4926 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
4927 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
4928 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
4929 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
4930 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
4931 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
4932 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
4933 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
4934 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
4935 desktop contains
4936 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
4937 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
4938 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
4939 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
4940
4941 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
4942 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
4943 release.</p>
4944
4945 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
4946 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
4947 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
4948 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
4949 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
4950 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
4951 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
4952 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
4953 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
4954 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
4955 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
4956
4957 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
4958
4959 <ul>
4960
4961 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
4962     work also without a attached tty.</li>
4963 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
4964     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
4965     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
4966     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
4967     required).</li>
4968
4969 </ul>
4970
4971 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
4972
4973 <ul>
4974
4975 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
4976 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
4977 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
4978 stick ISO image.</li>
4979 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
4980 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
4981 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
4982     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
4983     cope with this.</li>
4984 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
4985 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
4986     empty password hashes.</li>
4987 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
4988     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
4989     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
4990
4991 </ul>
4992
4993 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
4994
4995 <ul>
4996
4997 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
4998     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
4999 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
5000     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
5001
5002 </ul>
5003
5004 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5005
5006 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5007
5008 <ul>
5009
5010 <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>
5011
5012 <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>
5013
5014 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
5015
5016 </ul>
5017
5018 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
5019 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
5020
5021 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5022
5023 <ul>
5024
5025 <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>
5026 <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>
5027 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
5028
5029 </ul>
5030
5031 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
5032 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
5033
5034
5035 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5036
5037 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5038
5039       </div>
5040       <div class="tags">
5041
5042
5043         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5044
5045
5046       </div>
5047     </div>
5048     <div class="padding"></div>
5049
5050     <div class="entry">
5051       <div class="title">
5052         <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>
5053       </div>
5054       <div class="date">
5055         18th August 2013
5056       </div>
5057       <div class="body">
5058         <p>Earlier, I reported about
5059 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
5060 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
5061 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
5062 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
5063 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
5064 currently on the disk.</p>
5065
5066 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
5067 <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>
5068 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
5069 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
5070 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
5071 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
5072 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
5073 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
5074 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
5075 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
5076 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
5077 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
5078 the broken disks.</p>
5079
5080       </div>
5081       <div class="tags">
5082
5083
5084         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5085
5086
5087       </div>
5088     </div>
5089     <div class="padding"></div>
5090
5091     <div class="entry">
5092       <div class="title">
5093         <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>
5094       </div>
5095       <div class="date">
5096          2nd August 2013
5097       </div>
5098       <div class="body">
5099         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
5100 have worked on a Norwegian
5101 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
5102 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
5103 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
5104 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
5105 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
5106 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
5107 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
5108 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
5109 progress of the translation:</p>
5110
5111 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
5112
5113 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
5114 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
5115 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
5116 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
5117 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
5118 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
5119 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
5120 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
5121 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
5122 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
5123 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
5124
5125 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
5126 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
5127 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
5128 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
5129 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
5130 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
5131 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
5132 project files currently available from
5133 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
5134
5135 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
5136 the updated
5137 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
5138 and
5139 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
5140 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
5141 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
5142 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
5143
5144       </div>
5145       <div class="tags">
5146
5147
5148         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>.
5149
5150
5151       </div>
5152     </div>
5153     <div class="padding"></div>
5154
5155     <div class="entry">
5156       <div class="title">
5157         <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>
5158       </div>
5159       <div class="date">
5160         27th July 2013
5161       </div>
5162       <div class="body">
5163         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5164 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
5165
5166 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
5167 2013-07-27</strong></p>
5168
5169 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5170 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5171
5172 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5173
5174 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5175 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5176 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5177 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5178 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5179 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5180 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5181 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
5182 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5183 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5184 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5185 desktop contains
5186 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5187 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5188 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5189 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5190
5191 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5192 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5193 Squeeze release.</p>
5194
5195 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5196 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5197 release.</p>
5198
5199 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5200
5201 <ul>
5202
5203 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
5204    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
5205 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
5206    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
5207    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
5208    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
5209    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
5210 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
5211 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
5212 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
5213    crash bugs.</li>
5214
5215 </ul>
5216
5217 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5218
5219 <ul>
5220
5221 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
5222    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
5223 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
5224    netinst CD.</li>
5225 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
5226    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
5227 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
5228    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
5229    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
5230 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
5231    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
5232    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
5233 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
5234    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
5235    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
5236 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
5237    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
5238 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
5239
5240 </ul>
5241
5242 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5243
5244 <ul>
5245
5246 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
5247 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
5248     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
5249 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
5250
5251 </ul>
5252
5253 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5254
5255 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5256
5257 <ul>
5258
5259 <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>
5260
5261 <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>
5262
5263 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
5264
5265 </ul>
5266
5267 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
5268 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
5269
5270 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5271
5272 <ul>
5273
5274 <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>
5275 <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>
5276 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
5277
5278 </ul>
5279
5280 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
5281 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
5282
5283
5284 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5285
5286 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5287
5288       </div>
5289       <div class="tags">
5290
5291
5292         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5293
5294
5295       </div>
5296     </div>
5297     <div class="padding"></div>
5298
5299     <div class="entry">
5300       <div class="title">
5301         <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>
5302       </div>
5303       <div class="date">
5304         17th July 2013
5305       </div>
5306       <div class="body">
5307         <p>Today I switched to
5308 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
5309 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
5310 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
5311 <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
5312 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
5313 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
5314 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
5315 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
5316 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
5317 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
5318 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
5319 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
5320 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
5321 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
5322 station from now on.</p>
5323
5324 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
5325 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
5326 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
5327 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
5328 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
5329 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
5330 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
5331 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
5332 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
5333 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
5334 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
5335 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
5336
5337 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
5338 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
5339 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
5340 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
5341 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
5342 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
5343 parameters are tuned:</p>
5344
5345 <ul>
5346
5347 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
5348     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
5349
5350 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
5351     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
5352     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
5353
5354 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
5355     systems.</li>
5356
5357 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
5358     /etc/fstab.</li>
5359
5360 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
5361
5362 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
5363     cron.daily).</li>
5364
5365 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
5366     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
5367
5368 </ul>
5369
5370 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
5371 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
5372 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
5373 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
5374 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
5375 from getting the data on the disk (see
5376 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
5377 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
5378 right thing to do.</p>
5379
5380 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
5381 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
5382 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
5383
5384 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
5385 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
5386 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
5387 instead of during my work.</p>
5388
5389 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
5390 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
5391
5392 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
5393 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
5394 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
5395
5396 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
5397 there.</p>
5398
5399 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
5400 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
5401 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
5402 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
5403 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
5404 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
5405 back.</p>
5406
5407       </div>
5408       <div class="tags">
5409
5410
5411         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5412
5413
5414       </div>
5415     </div>
5416     <div class="padding"></div>
5417
5418     <div class="entry">
5419       <div class="title">
5420         <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>
5421       </div>
5422       <div class="date">
5423         10th July 2013
5424       </div>
5425       <div class="body">
5426         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
5427 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
5428 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
5429 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
5430 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
5431 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
5432 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
5433 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
5434
5435 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
5436 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
5437 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
5438 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
5439 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
5440 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
5441 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
5442 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
5443 lock up when I download a new
5444 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
5445 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
5446 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
5447
5448 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
5449 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
5450 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
5451 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
5452 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
5453 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
5454
5455 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
5456 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
5457 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
5458 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
5459 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
5460 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
5461
5462 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
5463 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
5464 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
5465 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
5466 exist).</p>
5467
5468       </div>
5469       <div class="tags">
5470
5471
5472         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5473
5474
5475       </div>
5476     </div>
5477     <div class="padding"></div>
5478
5479     <div class="entry">
5480       <div class="title">
5481         <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>
5482       </div>
5483       <div class="date">
5484          9th July 2013
5485       </div>
5486       <div class="body">
5487         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
5488 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
5489 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
5490 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
5491 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5492 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
5493 Bitraf</a>.</p>
5494
5495 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
5496 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
5497 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
5498 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
5499 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
5500
5501       </div>
5502       <div class="tags">
5503
5504
5505         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>.
5506
5507
5508       </div>
5509     </div>
5510     <div class="padding"></div>
5511
5512     <div class="entry">
5513       <div class="title">
5514         <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>
5515       </div>
5516       <div class="date">
5517          5th July 2013
5518       </div>
5519       <div class="body">
5520         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
5521 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
5522 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
5523 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
5524 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
5525 ended up picking a
5526 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
5527 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
5528 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
5529 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
5530 on that below.</p>
5531
5532 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
5533 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
5534 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
5535 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
5536 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
5537 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
5538 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
5539 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
5540 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
5541
5542 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
5543 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
5544 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
5545 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
5546 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
5547 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
5548 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
5549
5550 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
5551 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
5552
5553 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
5554 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
5555 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
5556 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
5557 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
5558 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
5559 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
5560 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
5561 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
5562 kernel developers as
5563 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
5564 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
5565 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
5566 Lenovo forums, both for
5567 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
5568 2012-11-10</a> and for
5569 <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
5570 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
5571 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
5572 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
5573 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
5574 There is even a
5575 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
5576 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
5577 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
5578
5579 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
5580 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
5581 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
5582 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
5583 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
5584 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
5585 fixed. :)</p>
5586
5587       </div>
5588       <div class="tags">
5589
5590
5591         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5592
5593
5594       </div>
5595     </div>
5596     <div class="padding"></div>
5597
5598     <div class="entry">
5599       <div class="title">
5600         <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>
5601       </div>
5602       <div class="date">
5603          4th July 2013
5604       </div>
5605       <div class="body">
5606         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
5607 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
5608 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
5609 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
5610 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
5611 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
5612 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
5613 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
5614 with an expencive door stop.</p>
5615
5616 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
5617 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
5618 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
5619 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
5620 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
5621 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
5622 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
5623
5624 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
5625 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
5626 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
5627 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
5628 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
5629 new laptop now. :)</p>
5630
5631 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
5632
5633       </div>
5634       <div class="tags">
5635
5636
5637         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5638
5639
5640       </div>
5641     </div>
5642     <div class="padding"></div>
5643
5644     <div class="entry">
5645       <div class="title">
5646         <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>
5647       </div>
5648       <div class="date">
5649          3rd July 2013
5650       </div>
5651       <div class="body">
5652         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5653 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
5654
5655 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
5656 2013-07-03</strong></p>
5657
5658 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5659 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5660
5661 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5662
5663 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5664 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5665 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5666 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5667 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5668 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5669 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5670 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
5671 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5672 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5673 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5674 desktop contains
5675 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5676 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5677 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5678 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5679
5680 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5681 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5682 Squeeze release.</p>
5683
5684 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5685 <ul>
5686   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
5687   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
5688     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
5689     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
5690   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
5691     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
5692     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
5693   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
5694     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
5695     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
5696     too.</li>
5697   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
5698     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
5699 </ul>
5700 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5701 <ul>
5702   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
5703   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
5704   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
5705     up for some language options.</li>
5706   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
5707   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
5708   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
5709     d-i is doing it.</li>
5710   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
5711     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
5712   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
5713     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
5714     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
5715   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
5716     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
5717   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
5718   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
5719     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
5720   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
5721     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
5722 </ul>
5723 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5724 <ul>
5725   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
5726     available yet (698840).</li>
5727   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
5728 </ul>
5729 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5730
5731 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5732 <ul>
5733   <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>
5734   <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>
5735   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
5736 </ul>
5737
5738 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
5739 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
5740
5741 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5742 <ul>
5743   <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>
5744   <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>
5745   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
5746 </ul>
5747
5748 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
5749 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
5750
5751 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5752
5753 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
5754
5755       </div>
5756       <div class="tags">
5757
5758
5759         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5760
5761
5762       </div>
5763     </div>
5764     <div class="padding"></div>
5765
5766     <div class="entry">
5767       <div class="title">
5768         <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>
5769       </div>
5770       <div class="date">
5771         25th June 2013
5772       </div>
5773       <div class="body">
5774         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
5775 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
5776 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
5777 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
5778 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
5779 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
5780 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
5781 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
5782 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
5783 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
5784 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
5785
5786 <p><pre>
5787 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
5788 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
5789 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
5790 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
5791 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
5792 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
5793 firmware-ipw2x00
5794 firmware-ipw2x00
5795 Preconfiguring packages ...
5796 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
5797 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
5798 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
5799 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
5800 #
5801 </pre></p>
5802
5803 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
5804 printed instead:</p>
5805
5806 <p><pre>
5807 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
5808 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
5809 #
5810 </pre></p>
5811
5812 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
5813 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
5814
5815 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
5816 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
5817 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
5818 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
5819 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
5820 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
5821 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
5822 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
5823 machine.</p>
5824
5825 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
5826 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
5827 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
5828 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
5829 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
5830 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
5831
5832       </div>
5833       <div class="tags">
5834
5835
5836         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
5837
5838
5839       </div>
5840     </div>
5841     <div class="padding"></div>
5842
5843     <div class="entry">
5844       <div class="title">
5845         <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>
5846       </div>
5847       <div class="date">
5848         22nd June 2013
5849       </div>
5850       <div class="body">
5851         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
5852 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
5853 which check that services are running, working, and return the
5854 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
5855 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
5856 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
5857 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
5858 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
5859 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
5860
5861 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
5862 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
5863 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
5864 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
5865 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
5866 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
5867 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
5868 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
5869 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
5870 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
5871 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
5872 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
5873 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
5874 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
5875
5876 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
5877 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
5878 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
5879 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
5880 the problem.</p>
5881
5882 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
5883 please join us on
5884 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
5885 irc.debian.org</a> and the
5886 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
5887 list.</p>
5888
5889       </div>
5890       <div class="tags">
5891
5892
5893         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5894
5895
5896       </div>
5897     </div>
5898     <div class="padding"></div>
5899
5900     <div class="entry">
5901       <div class="title">
5902         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
5903       </div>
5904       <div class="date">
5905         17th June 2013
5906       </div>
5907       <div class="body">
5908         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
5909 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
5910 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
5911 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
5912 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
5913 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
5914 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
5915 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
5916
5917 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
5918
5919 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
5920 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
5921 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
5922 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
5923 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
5924 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
5925 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
5926 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
5927 field.</p>
5928
5929 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
5930 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
5931 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
5932 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
5933 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
5934 the only one we have in our country.</p>
5935
5936 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
5937 project?</strong></p>
5938
5939 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
5940 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
5941 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
5942 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
5943 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
5944 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
5945 ways to contribute.</p>
5946
5947 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
5948 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
5949 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
5950 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
5951 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
5952 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
5953 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
5954 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
5955 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
5956 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
5957
5958 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
5959 Edu?</strong></p>
5960
5961 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
5962 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
5963 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
5964 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
5965 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
5966 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
5967 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
5968 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
5969
5970 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
5971 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
5972 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
5973 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
5974 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
5975 project.</p>
5976
5977 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5978 Edu?</strong></p>
5979
5980 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
5981 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
5982 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
5983 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
5984 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
5985 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
5986 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
5987 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
5988 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
5989
5990 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
5991 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
5992 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
5993 on.</p>
5994
5995 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
5996
5997 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
5998 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
5999 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
6000 Enlightenment project a lot!),
6001 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
6002 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
6003 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
6004 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
6005 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
6006
6007 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6008 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6009
6010 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
6011 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
6012 that:</p>
6013
6014 <ul>
6015
6016 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
6017
6018 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
6019     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
6020     of teenagers more?</li>
6021
6022 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
6023     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
6024     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
6025     them!)</li>
6026
6027 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
6028     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
6029     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
6030
6031 </ul>
6032
6033 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
6034 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
6035 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
6036 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
6037 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
6038
6039       </div>
6040       <div class="tags">
6041
6042
6043         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
6044
6045
6046       </div>
6047     </div>
6048     <div class="padding"></div>
6049
6050     <div class="entry">
6051       <div class="title">
6052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
6053       </div>
6054       <div class="date">
6055         12th June 2013
6056       </div>
6057       <div class="body">
6058         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
6059 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6060 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
6061 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
6062 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
6063 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
6064
6065 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6066
6067 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
6068 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
6069 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
6070
6071 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
6072 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
6073 each other.</p>
6074
6075 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6076 project?</strong></p>
6077
6078 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
6079 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
6080 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
6081 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
6082 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
6083 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
6084 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
6085 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
6086 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
6087 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
6088 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
6089 we'll get there one day.</p>
6090
6091 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6092 Edu?</strong></p>
6093
6094 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
6095 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
6096 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
6097 very high quality work.</p>
6098
6099 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
6100 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
6101 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
6102 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
6103 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
6104
6105 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6106 Edu?</strong></p>
6107
6108 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
6109 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
6110 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
6111
6112 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
6113 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
6114 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
6115 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
6116 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
6117 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
6118 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
6119 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
6120 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
6121 currently.</p>
6122
6123 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
6124 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
6125 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
6126 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
6127 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
6128 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
6129 autonomous.</p>
6130
6131 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6132
6133 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
6134 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
6135 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
6136 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
6137 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
6138
6139 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
6140 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
6141 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
6142 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
6143 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
6144 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
6145 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
6146 X.</p>
6147
6148 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
6149 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
6150 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
6151 it :p)
6152
6153 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6154 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6155
6156 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
6157 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
6158 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
6159 that.</p>
6160
6161 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
6162 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
6163 advantage of that.</p>
6164
6165 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
6166 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
6167 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
6168 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
6169 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
6170 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
6171 best solution for them.</p>
6172
6173 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
6174 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
6175 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
6176
6177       </div>
6178       <div class="tags">
6179
6180
6181         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
6182
6183
6184       </div>
6185     </div>
6186     <div class="padding"></div>
6187
6188     <div class="entry">
6189       <div class="title">
6190         <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>
6191       </div>
6192       <div class="date">
6193         11th June 2013
6194       </div>
6195       <div class="body">
6196         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
6197 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
6198 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
6199 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
6200 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
6201 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
6202 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
6203 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
6204 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
6205 i915 driver used by the
6206 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
6207 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
6208
6209 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
6210 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
6211 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
6212 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
6213 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
6214
6215 <pre>
6216 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
6217 update-initramfs -u -k all
6218 </pre>
6219
6220 <p>Since March 2012 there is
6221 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
6222 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
6223 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
6224 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
6225 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
6226 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
6227 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
6228 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
6229 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
6230 number.</p>
6231
6232 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
6233 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
6234
6235 <p><pre>
6236 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
6237     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
6238     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
6239  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
6240  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
6241     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
6242  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
6243     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
6244  Latency: 0
6245  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
6246  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
6247  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
6248  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
6249  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
6250  Capabilities: <access denied>
6251  Kernel driver in use: i915
6252 </pre></p>
6253
6254 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
6255
6256 <p><pre>
6257 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
6258        ...
6259         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
6260         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
6261        ...
6262 }
6263 </pre></p>
6264
6265 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
6266 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
6267 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
6268 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
6269 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
6270 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
6271 yet shown up in
6272 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
6273 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
6274 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
6275 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
6276 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
6277 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
6278
6279 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
6280 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
6281 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
6282 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
6283 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
6284 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
6285 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
6286 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
6287 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
6288 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
6289 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
6290 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
6291
6292 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
6293 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
6294 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
6295 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
6296 backlight.</p>
6297
6298       </div>
6299       <div class="tags">
6300
6301
6302         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6303
6304
6305       </div>
6306     </div>
6307     <div class="padding"></div>
6308
6309     <div class="entry">
6310       <div class="title">
6311         <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>
6312       </div>
6313       <div class="date">
6314         10th June 2013
6315       </div>
6316       <div class="body">
6317         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
6318 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6319
6320 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
6321 2013-06-10</strong></p>
6322
6323 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
6324 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
6325
6326 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6327
6328 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
6329 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
6330 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
6331 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
6332 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
6333 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
6334 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
6335 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
6336 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
6337 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
6338 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
6339 desktop contains
6340 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
6341 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
6342 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
6343 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
6344
6345 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
6346 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
6347 Squeeze release.</p>
6348
6349 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6350
6351 <ul>
6352
6353 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
6354 <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).
6355 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
6356 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
6357 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
6358
6359 </ul>
6360
6361 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6362
6363 <ul>
6364
6365 <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.
6366 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
6367 <li>New Romanian translation.
6368 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
6369 <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).
6370 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
6371 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
6372 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
6373 <li>More testsuite tests.
6374 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
6375 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
6376
6377 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
6378 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
6379
6380 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
6381 them up with GOsa².</li>
6382
6383 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
6384
6385 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
6386 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
6387 entered password). </li>
6388
6389 </ul>
6390
6391 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6392
6393 <ul>
6394
6395 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
6396
6397 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
6398 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
6399 missing import feature).</li>
6400
6401 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
6402
6403 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
6404 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
6405 unfixed.</li>
6406
6407 </ul>
6408
6409 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6410
6411 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6412
6413 <ul>
6414
6415 <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>
6416
6417 <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>
6418
6419 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
6420
6421 </ul>
6422
6423 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
6424 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
6425
6426 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6427
6428 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
6429
6430       </div>
6431       <div class="tags">
6432
6433
6434         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6435
6436
6437       </div>
6438     </div>
6439     <div class="padding"></div>
6440
6441     <div class="entry">
6442       <div class="title">
6443         <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>
6444       </div>
6445       <div class="date">
6446          5th June 2013
6447       </div>
6448       <div class="body">
6449         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
6450 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
6451 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
6452 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
6453 the project:
6454
6455 <ol>
6456
6457 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
6458   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
6459   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
6460   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
6461   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
6462
6463 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
6464   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
6465   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
6466   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
6467   #698840</a>.</li>
6468
6469 </ol>
6470
6471 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
6472 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
6473 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
6474
6475       </div>
6476       <div class="tags">
6477
6478
6479         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6480
6481
6482       </div>
6483     </div>
6484     <div class="padding"></div>
6485
6486     <div class="entry">
6487       <div class="title">
6488         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
6489       </div>
6490       <div class="date">
6491          4th June 2013
6492       </div>
6493       <div class="body">
6494         <p>It has been a while since my last English
6495 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
6496 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
6497 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
6498 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
6499 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
6500
6501 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6502
6503 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
6504 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
6505 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
6506 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
6507
6508 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
6509 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
6510 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
6511
6512 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6513 project?</strong></p>
6514
6515 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
6516 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
6517 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
6518 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
6519 manual.
6520
6521 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
6522 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
6523 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
6524 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
6525
6526 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
6527 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
6528 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
6529 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
6530 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
6531 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
6532 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
6533 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
6534 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
6535 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
6536
6537 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
6538 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
6539 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
6540 beautiful project.</p>
6541
6542 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6543 Edu?</strong></p>
6544
6545 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
6546 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
6547 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
6548
6549 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
6550 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
6551 of educational free software.</p>
6552
6553 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6554 Edu?</strong></p>
6555
6556 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
6557 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
6558 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
6559 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
6560 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
6561
6562 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
6563 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
6564 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
6565 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
6566 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
6567 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
6568 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
6569 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
6570
6571 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6572
6573 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
6574 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
6575 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
6576 also using the mathematical software
6577 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
6578 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
6579 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
6580
6581 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
6582 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
6583 statistics?</strong></p>
6584
6585 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
6586 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
6587 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
6588 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
6589
6590 <ul>
6591
6592 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
6593 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
6594 constructions in planar geometry
6595
6596 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
6597 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
6598 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
6599
6600 </ul>
6601
6602 <p>I like also
6603 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
6604 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
6605 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
6606
6607 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6608 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6609
6610 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
6611
6612 <ul>
6613
6614 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
6615
6616 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
6617     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
6618     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
6619
6620 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
6621
6622 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
6623     system.</li>
6624
6625 </ul>
6626
6627       </div>
6628       <div class="tags">
6629
6630
6631         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
6632
6633
6634       </div>
6635     </div>
6636     <div class="padding"></div>
6637
6638     <div class="entry">
6639       <div class="title">
6640         <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>
6641       </div>
6642       <div class="date">
6643          1st June 2013
6644       </div>
6645       <div class="body">
6646         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6647 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
6648 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
6649 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
6650 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
6651 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
6652 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
6653 program.</p>
6654
6655 <!-- 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 -->
6656
6657 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
6658 <p>
6659 <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>
6660 <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>
6661 <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>
6662 <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>
6663 <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>
6664 <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>
6665 <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>
6666 <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>
6667 <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>
6668 <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>
6669 <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>
6670 <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>
6671 <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>
6672 <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>
6673 </p>
6674
6675 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
6676 <p>
6677 <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>
6678 <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>
6679 <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>
6680 <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>
6681 <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>
6682 <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>
6683 </p>
6684
6685 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
6686 <p>
6687 <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>
6688 </p>
6689
6690 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
6691 <p>
6692 <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>
6693 <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>
6694 <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>
6695 <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>
6696 <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>
6697 <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>
6698 <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>
6699 <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>
6700 <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>
6701 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
6702 <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>
6703 </p>
6704
6705 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
6706 <p>
6707 <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>
6708 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
6709 </p>
6710
6711 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
6712 <p>
6713 <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>
6714 <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>
6715 <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>
6716 </p>
6717
6718 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
6719 <p>
6720 <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>
6721 <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>
6722 <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>
6723 <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>
6724 <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>
6725 </p>
6726
6727 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
6728 <p>
6729 <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>
6730 <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>
6731 <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>
6732 <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>
6733 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
6734 <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>
6735 <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>
6736 <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>
6737 <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>
6738 <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>
6739 <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>
6740 <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>
6741 <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>
6742 <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>
6743 <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>
6744 <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>
6745 <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>
6746 </p>
6747
6748 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
6749 <p>
6750 <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>
6751 <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>
6752 </p>
6753
6754 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
6755 <p>
6756 <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>
6757 <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>
6758 <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>
6759 <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>
6760 <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>
6761 <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>
6762 <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>
6763 <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>
6764 <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>
6765 <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>
6766 </p>
6767
6768 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
6769 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
6770 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
6771 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
6772 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
6773 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
6774 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
6775
6776       </div>
6777       <div class="tags">
6778
6779
6780         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6781
6782
6783       </div>
6784     </div>
6785     <div class="padding"></div>
6786
6787     <div class="entry">
6788       <div class="title">
6789         <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>
6790       </div>
6791       <div class="date">
6792         27th May 2013
6793       </div>
6794       <div class="body">
6795         <p>Two days ago, I asked
6796 <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
6797 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
6798 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
6799 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
6800 and Windows 8.</p>
6801
6802 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
6803 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
6804 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
6805 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
6806 enough to tell.</p>
6807
6808 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
6809 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
6810 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
6811 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
6812 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
6813 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
6814 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
6815 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
6816 to follow.</p>
6817
6818 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
6819 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
6820 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
6821 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
6822 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
6823 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
6824 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
6825 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
6826
6827 <p>I've updated the
6828 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
6829 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
6830 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
6831 machine.</p>
6832
6833 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
6834 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
6835
6836       </div>
6837       <div class="tags">
6838
6839
6840         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6841
6842
6843       </div>
6844     </div>
6845     <div class="padding"></div>
6846
6847     <div class="entry">
6848       <div class="title">
6849         <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>
6850       </div>
6851       <div class="date">
6852         25th May 2013
6853       </div>
6854       <div class="body">
6855         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
6856 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
6857 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
6858 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
6859 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
6860 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
6861
6862 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
6863 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
6864 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
6865 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
6866 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
6867 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
6868 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
6869 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
6870 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
6871 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
6872
6873 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
6874 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
6875 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
6876 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
6877 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
6878 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
6879
6880 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
6881 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
6882 on new Laptops?</p>
6883
6884       </div>
6885       <div class="tags">
6886
6887
6888         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6889
6890
6891       </div>
6892     </div>
6893     <div class="padding"></div>
6894
6895     <div class="entry">
6896       <div class="title">
6897         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
6898       </div>
6899       <div class="date">
6900         17th May 2013
6901       </div>
6902       <div class="body">
6903         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
6904 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
6905 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
6906 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
6907 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
6908 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
6909 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
6910 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
6911 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
6912 donate some money</a>.
6913
6914 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
6915 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
6916 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
6917 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
6918 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
6919
6920 <p>The script,
6921 <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/>
6922 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
6923 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
6924 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
6925
6926 <ol>
6927
6928 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
6929 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
6930 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
6931     our configuration.</li>
6932 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
6933     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
6934     according to the profile specified in the config above,
6935     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
6936 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
6937     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
6938 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
6939
6940 </ol>
6941
6942 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
6943 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
6944 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
6945 the needed packages.</p>
6946
6947 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
6948 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
6949 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
6950 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
6951 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
6952 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
6953
6954 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
6955 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
6956 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
6957
6958 <p><pre>
6959 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
6960 DESKTOP="lxde"
6961 </pre></p>
6962
6963 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
6964 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
6965 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
6966 boot.</p>
6967
6968       </div>
6969       <div class="tags">
6970
6971
6972         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>.
6973
6974
6975       </div>
6976     </div>
6977     <div class="padding"></div>
6978
6979     <div class="entry">
6980       <div class="title">
6981         <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>
6982       </div>
6983       <div class="date">
6984         14th May 2013
6985       </div>
6986       <div class="body">
6987         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6988 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
6989 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6990
6991 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
6992 2013-05-14</strong></p>
6993
6994 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
6995 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
6996 codename "Wheezy".</p>
6997
6998 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6999
7000 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
7001 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7002 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
7003 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7004 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7005 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7006 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
7007 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
7008
7009 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7010 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7011 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7012
7013 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7014 <ul>
7015   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
7016     default.</li>
7017   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
7018   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
7019   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
7020     ibus-anthy.</li>
7021 </ul>
7022
7023 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7024 <ul>
7025
7026   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
7027     reliability improvements.</li>
7028   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
7029     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
7030   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
7031     problems.</li>
7032   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
7033     direct:// URL.</li>
7034   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
7035   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
7036   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
7037   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
7038     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
7039   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
7040     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
7041 </ul>
7042
7043 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7044 <ul>
7045
7046   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
7047     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
7048     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
7049   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
7050   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7051     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
7052   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
7053   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
7054   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
7055     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
7056   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
7057     password submission problem
7058     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
7059
7060 </ul>
7061
7062 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7063
7064 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7065 <ul>
7066
7067   <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>
7068   <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>
7069   <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>
7070
7071 </ul>
7072
7073 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
7074
7075 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
7076
7077 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7078
7079 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7080
7081       </div>
7082       <div class="tags">
7083
7084
7085         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7086
7087
7088       </div>
7089     </div>
7090     <div class="padding"></div>
7091
7092     <div class="entry">
7093       <div class="title">
7094         <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>
7095       </div>
7096       <div class="date">
7097         11th May 2013
7098       </div>
7099       <div class="body">
7100         <P>In January,
7101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7102 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7103 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7104 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7105 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7106 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7107 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7108 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7109 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7110 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7111 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7112 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7113
7114 <p><table>
7115 <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>
7116 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7117 <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>
7118 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7119 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7120 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7121 <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>
7122 <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>
7123 <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>
7124 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7125 </table></p>
7126
7127 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7128 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7129 available in experimental.</p>
7130
7131 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7132 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7133 for LEGO designers.</p>
7134
7135       </div>
7136       <div class="tags">
7137
7138
7139         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
7140
7141
7142       </div>
7143     </div>
7144     <div class="padding"></div>
7145
7146     <div class="entry">
7147       <div class="title">
7148         <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>
7149       </div>
7150       <div class="date">
7151          5th May 2013
7152       </div>
7153       <div class="body">
7154         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7155 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7156 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7157 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7158 soon.</p>
7159
7160 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7161 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7162 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7163 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7164 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7165 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7166 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7167 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7168 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7169 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7170 Edu.</a>
7171
7172 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7173 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7174 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7175 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7176 follow.<p>
7177
7178       </div>
7179       <div class="tags">
7180
7181
7182         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>.
7183
7184
7185       </div>
7186     </div>
7187     <div class="padding"></div>
7188
7189     <div class="entry">
7190       <div class="title">
7191         <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>
7192       </div>
7193       <div class="date">
7194         26th April 2013
7195       </div>
7196       <div class="body">
7197         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
7198 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
7199 announcement:</p>
7200
7201 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
7202 2013-04-26</strong></p>
7203
7204 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
7205 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7206
7207 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7208
7209 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7210 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7211 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7212 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
7213 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7214 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7215 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7216 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
7217 installed via the network.</p>
7218
7219 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7220 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7221 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7222
7223 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7224
7225 <ul>
7226 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
7227   <ul>
7228      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
7229      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
7230          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
7231          manual.)</li>
7232      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
7233      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
7234      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
7235      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
7236      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
7237      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
7238      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
7239      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
7240      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
7241      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
7242      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
7243      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
7244          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
7245          manual</a> for more details.</li>
7246      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
7247          installation.</li>
7248      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
7249          <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>
7250   </ul></li>
7251 </ul>
7252
7253 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
7254 <ul>
7255 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
7256     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
7257     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
7258 </ul>
7259
7260 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
7261 <ul>
7262 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
7263     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
7264     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
7265 </ul>
7266
7267 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7268 <ul>
7269 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
7270     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
7271     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
7272 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
7273     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
7274     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
7275 </ul>
7276
7277 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
7278 <ul>
7279 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
7280     yet.</li>
7281 </ul>
7282
7283 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
7284
7285 <ul>
7286 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
7287     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
7288     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
7289 </ul>
7290
7291 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7292
7293 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
7294 <ul>
7295 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
7296 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
7297 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
7298 </ul>
7299
7300 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
7301
7302 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
7303
7304 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7305
7306 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7307
7308       </div>
7309       <div class="tags">
7310
7311
7312         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7313
7314
7315       </div>
7316     </div>
7317     <div class="padding"></div>
7318
7319     <div class="entry">
7320       <div class="title">
7321         <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>
7322       </div>
7323       <div class="date">
7324         16th April 2013
7325       </div>
7326       <div class="body">
7327         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
7328 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
7329 Details about the gathering can be found
7330 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
7331 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
7332 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
7333 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
7334 weekend.</p>
7335
7336 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
7337 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
7338 Edu release.</p>
7339
7340 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
7341
7342       </div>
7343       <div class="tags">
7344
7345
7346         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7347
7348
7349       </div>
7350     </div>
7351     <div class="padding"></div>
7352
7353     <div class="entry">
7354       <div class="title">
7355         <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>
7356       </div>
7357       <div class="date">
7358          3rd April 2013
7359       </div>
7360       <div class="body">
7361         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7362 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7363 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7364 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7365
7366 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7367 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7368 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7369 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7370 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7371 BTS. :)</p>
7372
7373       </div>
7374       <div class="tags">
7375
7376
7377         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
7378
7379
7380       </div>
7381     </div>
7382     <div class="padding"></div>
7383
7384     <div class="entry">
7385       <div class="title">
7386         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
7387       </div>
7388       <div class="date">
7389         26th March 2013
7390       </div>
7391       <div class="body">
7392         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
7393 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
7394 font you use when printing.</p>
7395
7396 <p>Three years ago,
7397 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
7398 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
7399 changed their default front from
7400 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
7401 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
7402 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
7403 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
7404 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
7405 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
7406 prints.</p>
7407
7408 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
7409 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
7410 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
7411 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
7412 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
7413 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
7414 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
7415 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
7416 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
7417 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
7418 depend on the documents printed.</p>
7419
7420 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
7421 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
7422 and save some money in the process.</p>
7423
7424 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
7425 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
7426 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
7427 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
7428 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
7429 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
7430 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
7431 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
7432 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
7433
7434       </div>
7435       <div class="tags">
7436
7437
7438         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7439
7440
7441       </div>
7442     </div>
7443     <div class="padding"></div>
7444
7445     <div class="entry">
7446       <div class="title">
7447         <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>
7448       </div>
7449       <div class="date">
7450         24th March 2013
7451       </div>
7452       <div class="body">
7453         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
7454 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
7455 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
7456 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
7457 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
7458 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
7459 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
7460 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
7461 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
7462 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
7463 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
7464 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
7465
7466 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
7467 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
7468 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
7469 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
7470 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
7471 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
7472 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
7473 all I had to do was to use the
7474 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
7475 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
7476 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
7477 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
7478 xsltproc/fop (aka
7479 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
7480 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
7481 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
7482 technical detail.</p>
7483
7484 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
7485 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
7486 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
7487 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
7488 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
7489 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
7490
7491 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
7492 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
7493 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
7494 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
7495 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
7496 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
7497 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
7498 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
7499 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
7500
7501 <p><blockquote><pre>
7502 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7503 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7504   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
7505     &lt;hr/&gt;
7506   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7507 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7508 </pre></blockquote></p>
7509
7510 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
7511
7512 <p><blockquote><pre>
7513 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7514 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7515   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
7516     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
7517       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
7518     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
7519   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7520 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7521 </pre></blockquote></p>
7522
7523 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
7524 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
7525 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
7526 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
7527 enough.</p>
7528
7529 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
7530 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
7531 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
7532 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
7533 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
7534 look like this:</p>
7535
7536 <p><blockquote><pre>
7537 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7538 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7539   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
7540     &lt;br/&gt;
7541   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7542 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7543 </pre></blockquote></p>
7544
7545 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
7546
7547 <p><blockquote><pre>
7548 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7549 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
7550   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
7551   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
7552     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
7553   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7554 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7555 </pre></blockquote></p>
7556
7557 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
7558 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
7559 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
7560 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
7561 page.</p>
7562
7563 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
7564 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
7565 github</a>
7566 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
7567 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
7568 days.</p>
7569
7570       </div>
7571       <div class="tags">
7572
7573
7574         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>.
7575
7576
7577       </div>
7578     </div>
7579     <div class="padding"></div>
7580
7581     <div class="entry">
7582       <div class="title">
7583         <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>
7584       </div>
7585       <div class="date">
7586         17th March 2013
7587       </div>
7588       <div class="body">
7589         <p>Via
7590 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
7591 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
7592 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
7593 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
7594 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
7595 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
7596 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
7597
7598 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
7599 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
7600
7601 <blockquote>
7602 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
7603 </blockquote>
7604
7605 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
7606
7607 <blockquote>
7608 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
7609 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
7610 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
7611 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
7612 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
7613 </blockquote>
7614
7615 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
7616 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
7617 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
7618 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
7619
7620 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
7621 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
7622
7623 <blockquote>
7624 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
7625 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
7626 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
7627 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
7628 </blockquote>
7629
7630 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
7631 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
7632 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
7633 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
7634 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
7635
7636 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
7637 embedding:</p>
7638
7639 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
7640
7641       </div>
7642       <div class="tags">
7643
7644
7645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
7646
7647
7648       </div>
7649     </div>
7650     <div class="padding"></div>
7651
7652     <div class="entry">
7653       <div class="title">
7654         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
7655       </div>
7656       <div class="date">
7657          8th March 2013
7658       </div>
7659       <div class="body">
7660         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
7661 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
7662 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
7663 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
7664 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
7665 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
7666 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
7667
7668 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
7669
7670 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
7671 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
7672
7673 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
7674 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
7675 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
7676 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
7677 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
7678 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
7679
7680 <p>Images are available for download at
7681 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
7682
7683 <p>md5sums:
7684 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
7685 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
7686 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
7687
7688 <p>sha1sums:
7689 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
7690 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
7691 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
7692
7693 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
7694
7695 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
7696 2013-03-03:</p>
7697
7698 <ul>
7699   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
7700   <ul>
7701         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
7702         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
7703   </ul></li>
7704   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
7705   <ul>
7706         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
7707         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
7708   </ul></li>
7709   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
7710      <ul>
7711         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
7712         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
7713         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
7714                 Closes: #664596</li>
7715         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
7716                 Closes: #664976</li>
7717         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
7718            <ul>
7719                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
7720                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
7721            </ul></li>
7722         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
7723            <ul>
7724                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
7725                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
7726                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
7727                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
7728                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
7729            </ul></li>
7730         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
7731     </ul>
7732   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
7733     <ul>
7734         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
7735     </ul></li>
7736 </ul>
7737
7738 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
7739 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
7740 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
7741 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
7742
7743 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
7744 mailinglist
7745 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
7746 </p></blockquote>
7747
7748 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
7749
7750       </div>
7751       <div class="tags">
7752
7753
7754         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7755
7756
7757       </div>
7758     </div>
7759     <div class="padding"></div>
7760
7761     <div class="entry">
7762       <div class="title">
7763         <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>
7764       </div>
7765       <div class="date">
7766          3rd March 2013
7767       </div>
7768       <div class="body">
7769         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
7770 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
7771 support using
7772 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
7773 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
7774 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
7775 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
7776 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
7777 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
7778 using the GNU LGPL, and
7779 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
7780
7781 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
7782 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
7783 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
7784 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
7785 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
7786 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
7787
7788 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
7789 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
7790 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
7791 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
7792 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
7793 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
7794 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
7795 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
7796 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
7797 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
7798 signal distribution is handled using
7799 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
7800 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
7801 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
7802 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
7803 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
7804 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
7805 them up a bit more first.</p>
7806
7807 <p>The development is coordinated on the
7808 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
7809 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
7810 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
7811 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
7812 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
7813 development.</p>
7814
7815       </div>
7816       <div class="tags">
7817
7818
7819         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>.
7820
7821
7822       </div>
7823     </div>
7824     <div class="padding"></div>
7825
7826     <div class="entry">
7827       <div class="title">
7828         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
7829       </div>
7830       <div class="date">
7831         27th February 2013
7832       </div>
7833       <div class="body">
7834         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
7835 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
7836 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
7837 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
7838 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
7839 (where I am the chair of the board) and
7840 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
7841 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
7842 GNU», with this description:
7843
7844 <p><blockquote>
7845 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
7846 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
7847 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
7848 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
7849 </blockquote></p>
7850
7851 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
7852 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
7853 am really curious how many will show up.  See
7854 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
7855 page</a> for the location details.</p>
7856
7857       </div>
7858       <div class="tags">
7859
7860
7861         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>.
7862
7863
7864       </div>
7865     </div>
7866     <div class="padding"></div>
7867
7868     <div class="entry">
7869       <div class="title">
7870         <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>
7871       </div>
7872       <div class="date">
7873         15th February 2013
7874       </div>
7875       <div class="body">
7876         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
7877 now a great source of free maps available from
7878 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
7879 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
7880 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
7881 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
7882 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
7883 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
7884 page for descriptions).</p>
7885
7886 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
7887 map you can just edit the
7888 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
7889 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
7890
7891       </div>
7892       <div class="tags">
7893
7894
7895         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>.
7896
7897
7898       </div>
7899     </div>
7900     <div class="padding"></div>
7901
7902     <div class="entry">
7903       <div class="title">
7904         <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>
7905       </div>
7906       <div class="date">
7907         12th February 2013
7908       </div>
7909       <div class="body">
7910         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
7911 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
7912 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
7913 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
7914 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
7915 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
7916 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
7917 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
7918 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
7919 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
7920 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
7921 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
7922 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
7923 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
7924 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
7925 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
7926
7927 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
7928 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
7929 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
7930 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
7931 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
7932 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
7933 fields:</p>
7934
7935 <p><pre>
7936 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
7937 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
7938 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
7939 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
7940 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
7941 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
7942 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
7943 </pre></p>
7944
7945 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
7946 answer regarding
7947 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
7948 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
7949 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
7950 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
7951
7952 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
7953
7954 <p><pre>
7955 BEGIN:VCARD
7956 VERSION:2.1
7957 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
7958 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
7959 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
7960 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
7961 REV:20130212T095000Z
7962 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
7963 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
7964 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
7965 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
7966 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
7967 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
7968 END:VCARD
7969 </pre></p>
7970
7971 <p>The resulting QR code created using
7972 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
7973 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
7974 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
7975 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
7976 system.</p>
7977
7978 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
7979
7980 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
7981 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
7982 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
7983 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
7984
7985 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
7986 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
7987
7988       </div>
7989       <div class="tags">
7990
7991
7992         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>.
7993
7994
7995       </div>
7996     </div>
7997     <div class="padding"></div>
7998
7999     <div class="entry">
8000       <div class="title">
8001         <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>
8002       </div>
8003       <div class="date">
8004         10th February 2013
8005       </div>
8006       <div class="body">
8007         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
8008
8009 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
8010 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
8011 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
8012 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
8013 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
8014 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
8015 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
8016 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
8017 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
8018 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
8019 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
8020
8021 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
8022 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
8023 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
8024 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
8025 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
8026 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
8027 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
8028 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
8029 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
8030 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
8031 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
8032 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
8033 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
8034 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
8035 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
8036 ones own
8037 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
8038 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
8039 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
8040 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
8041 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
8042 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
8043 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
8044 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
8045 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
8046 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
8047 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
8048
8049 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
8050 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
8051 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
8052 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
8053 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
8054 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
8055
8056 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
8057 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
8058 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
8059
8060       </div>
8061       <div class="tags">
8062
8063
8064         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8065
8066
8067       </div>
8068     </div>
8069     <div class="padding"></div>
8070
8071     <div class="entry">
8072       <div class="title">
8073         <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>
8074       </div>
8075       <div class="date">
8076          2nd February 2013
8077       </div>
8078       <div class="body">
8079         <p>My
8080 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
8081 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
8082 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
8083 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
8084 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
8085 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
8086 version too.</p>
8087
8088 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
8089 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
8090 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
8091 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
8092 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
8093 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
8094 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
8095 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
8096
8097 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
8098 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
8099 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
8100 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
8101 it. :)</p>
8102
8103 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8104 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8105 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8106
8107       </div>
8108       <div class="tags">
8109
8110
8111         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>.
8112
8113
8114       </div>
8115     </div>
8116     <div class="padding"></div>
8117
8118     <div class="entry">
8119       <div class="title">
8120         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
8121       </div>
8122       <div class="date">
8123         22nd January 2013
8124       </div>
8125       <div class="body">
8126         <p>Yesterday, I
8127 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
8128 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
8129 pluggable hardware devices, which I
8130 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
8131 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
8132 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
8133 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
8134 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
8135 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
8136 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
8137 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
8138 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
8139 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
8140
8141 <pre>
8142 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
8143 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
8144 </pre>
8145
8146 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
8147 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
8148 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
8149 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
8150
8151 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
8152 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
8153 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
8154 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
8155 word.</p>
8156
8157 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
8158 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
8159 process.</p>
8160
8161 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
8162 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
8163
8164       </div>
8165       <div class="tags">
8166
8167
8168         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8169
8170
8171       </div>
8172     </div>
8173     <div class="padding"></div>
8174
8175     <div class="entry">
8176       <div class="title">
8177         <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>
8178       </div>
8179       <div class="date">
8180         21st January 2013
8181       </div>
8182       <div class="body">
8183         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
8184 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
8185 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
8186 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
8187 it, fetch the
8188 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
8189 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
8190 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
8191 autostart script.</p>
8192
8193 <p>The design is simple:</p>
8194
8195 <ul>
8196
8197 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
8198 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
8199
8200 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
8201 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
8202 initially did.</li>
8203
8204 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
8205 the APT database, a database
8206 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
8207 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
8208
8209 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
8210 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
8211 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
8212 package or packages.</li>
8213
8214 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
8215 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
8216
8217 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
8218 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
8219
8220 </ul>
8221
8222 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
8223 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
8224 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
8225 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
8226
8227 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
8228 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
8229 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
8230 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
8231 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
8232
8233 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
8234 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
8235 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
8236 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
8237 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
8238 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
8239 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
8240 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
8241
8242 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
8243 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
8244 '<tt>svn checkout
8245 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
8246 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
8247 devscripts package.</p>
8248
8249 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
8250 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
8251 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
8252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
8253 instructions</a> for details.</p>
8254
8255       </div>
8256       <div class="tags">
8257
8258
8259         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8260
8261
8262       </div>
8263     </div>
8264     <div class="padding"></div>
8265
8266     <div class="entry">
8267       <div class="title">
8268         <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>
8269       </div>
8270       <div class="date">
8271         19th January 2013
8272       </div>
8273       <div class="body">
8274         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
8275 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
8276 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
8277 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
8278 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
8279 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
8280 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
8281 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
8282 not a durable solution.
8283
8284 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
8285 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
8286
8287 <ul>
8288
8289 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
8290   than A4).</li>
8291 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
8292 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
8293 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
8294 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
8295 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
8296 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
8297 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
8298 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
8299 size).</li>
8300 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
8301   X.org packages.</li>
8302 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
8303   the time).
8304
8305 </ul>
8306
8307 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
8308 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
8309 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
8310 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
8311 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
8312 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
8313 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
8314 still be useful.</p>
8315
8316 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
8317 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
8318 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
8319 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
8320 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
8321 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
8322
8323       </div>
8324       <div class="tags">
8325
8326
8327         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8328
8329
8330       </div>
8331     </div>
8332     <div class="padding"></div>
8333
8334     <div class="entry">
8335       <div class="title">
8336         <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>
8337       </div>
8338       <div class="date">
8339         18th January 2013
8340       </div>
8341       <div class="body">
8342         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
8343 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
8344 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
8345 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
8346 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
8347 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
8348 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
8349
8350 <pre>
8351 #!/usr/bin/python
8352 import sys
8353 import apt
8354 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8355     cache = apt.Cache()
8356     cache.open(None)
8357     thepkgs = []
8358     for pkg in cache:
8359         version = pkg.candidate
8360         if version is None:
8361             version = pkg.installed
8362         if version is None:
8363             continue
8364         record = version.record
8365         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
8366             continue
8367         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
8368         for t in mime_types:
8369             t = t.rstrip().strip()
8370             if t == mimetype:
8371                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
8372     return thepkgs
8373 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
8374 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
8375     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
8376 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
8377 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8378     print "  %s" %pkg
8379 </pre>
8380
8381 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
8382
8383 <pre>
8384 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
8385 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
8386   gecko-mediaplayer
8387 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
8388 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
8389   browser-plugin-gnash
8390 %
8391 </pre>
8392
8393 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
8394 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
8395 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
8396 anyone working on adding it?</p>
8397
8398 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
8399 request for icweasel support for this feature is
8400 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
8401 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
8402 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
8403 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
8404
8405       </div>
8406       <div class="tags">
8407
8408
8409         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8410
8411
8412       </div>
8413     </div>
8414     <div class="padding"></div>
8415
8416     <div class="entry">
8417       <div class="title">
8418         <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>
8419       </div>
8420       <div class="date">
8421         16th January 2013
8422       </div>
8423       <div class="body">
8424         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
8425 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
8426 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
8427 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
8428 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
8429 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
8430 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
8431 downloaded by the browser.</p>
8432
8433 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
8434 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
8435 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
8436 can be found on the
8437 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
8438 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
8439 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
8440 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
8441 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
8442
8443 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
8444
8445 <pre>
8446   count MIME type
8447   ----- -----------------------
8448      32 text/plain
8449      30 audio/mpeg
8450      29 image/png
8451      28 image/jpeg
8452      27 application/ogg
8453      26 audio/x-mp3
8454      25 image/tiff
8455      25 image/gif
8456      22 image/bmp
8457      22 audio/x-wav
8458      20 audio/x-flac
8459      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8460      18 video/x-ms-asf
8461      18 audio/x-musepack
8462      18 audio/x-mpeg
8463      18 application/x-ogg
8464      17 video/mpeg
8465      17 audio/x-scpls
8466      17 audio/ogg
8467      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8468 </pre>
8469
8470 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
8471
8472 <pre>
8473   count MIME type
8474   ----- -----------------------
8475      33 text/plain
8476      32 image/png
8477      32 image/jpeg
8478      29 audio/mpeg
8479      27 image/gif
8480      26 image/tiff
8481      26 application/ogg
8482      25 audio/x-mp3
8483      22 image/bmp
8484      21 audio/x-wav
8485      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8486      19 audio/x-mpeg
8487      18 video/mpeg
8488      18 audio/x-scpls
8489      18 audio/x-flac
8490      18 application/x-ogg
8491      17 video/x-ms-asf
8492      17 text/html
8493      17 audio/x-musepack
8494      16 image/x-xbitmap
8495 </pre>
8496
8497 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
8498
8499 <pre>
8500   count MIME type
8501   ----- -----------------------
8502      31 text/plain
8503      31 image/png
8504      31 image/jpeg
8505      29 audio/mpeg
8506      28 application/ogg
8507      27 image/gif
8508      26 image/tiff
8509      26 audio/x-mp3
8510      23 audio/x-wav
8511      22 image/bmp
8512      21 audio/x-flac
8513      20 audio/x-mpegurl
8514      19 audio/x-mpeg
8515      18 video/x-ms-asf
8516      18 video/mpeg
8517      18 audio/x-scpls
8518      18 application/x-ogg
8519      17 audio/x-musepack
8520      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8521      16 video/x-msvideo
8522 </pre>
8523
8524 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
8525 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
8526 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
8527 issues.</p>
8528
8529 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
8530 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
8531
8532       </div>
8533       <div class="tags">
8534
8535
8536         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8537
8538
8539       </div>
8540     </div>
8541     <div class="padding"></div>
8542
8543     <div class="entry">
8544       <div class="title">
8545         <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>
8546       </div>
8547       <div class="date">
8548         15th January 2013
8549       </div>
8550       <div class="body">
8551         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
8552 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
8553 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
8554 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
8555 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
8556 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
8557 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
8558 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
8559 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
8560 packages.</p>
8561
8562 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
8563 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
8564 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
8565 modalias.</p>
8566
8567 <p><blockquote>
8568 Package: package-name
8569 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
8570 </blockquote></p>
8571
8572 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
8573 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
8574
8575 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8576 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8577
8578 <p><blockquote>
8579 Package: cheese
8580 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8581 </blockquote></p>
8582
8583 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8584 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8585
8586 <p><blockquote>
8587 Package: pcmciautils
8588 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8589 </blockquote></p>
8590
8591 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8592 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8593
8594 <p><blockquote>
8595 Package: colorhug-client
8596 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8597 </blockquote></p>
8598
8599 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8600 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8601 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8602
8603 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8604 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8605 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8606 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8607 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8608 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8609 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8610 Raring.</p>
8611
8612 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8613 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8614 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8615 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8616 try the
8617 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8618 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8619 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8620 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8621
8622 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8623 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8624
8625 <p><blockquote>
8626 % ./hw-support-lookup
8627 <br>yubikey-personalization
8628 <br>%
8629 </blockquote></p>
8630
8631 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8632 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8633
8634 <p><blockquote>
8635 % ./hw-support-lookup
8636 <br>pcmciautils
8637 <br>%
8638 </blockquote></p>
8639
8640 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8641 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8642 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8643
8644 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8645 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8646 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8647 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8648 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8649 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8650 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8651 see if it work.</p>
8652
8653 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8654 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8655 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8656 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8657
8658       </div>
8659       <div class="tags">
8660
8661
8662         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8663
8664
8665       </div>
8666     </div>
8667     <div class="padding"></div>
8668
8669     <div class="entry">
8670       <div class="title">
8671         <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>
8672       </div>
8673       <div class="date">
8674         14th January 2013
8675       </div>
8676       <div class="body">
8677         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8678 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8679 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8680 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8681 in
8682 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8683 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8684
8685 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8686
8687 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8688 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8689 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8690 &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;,
8691 &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
8692 &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;.
8693
8694 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8695 this shell script:</p>
8696
8697 <pre>
8698 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8699 </pre>
8700
8701 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8702 using modinfo:</p>
8703
8704 <pre>
8705 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8706 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8707 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8708 %
8709 </pre>
8710
8711 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8712
8713 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8714 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8715
8716 <p><blockquote>
8717 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8718 </blockquote></p>
8719
8720 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8721
8722 <pre>
8723  v   00008086  (vendor)
8724  d   00002770  (device)
8725  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8726  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8727  bc  06        (bus class)
8728  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8729  i   00        (interface)
8730 </pre>
8731
8732 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8733 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8734 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8735 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8736
8737 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8738 means.</p>
8739
8740 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8741
8742 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8743 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8744
8745 <p><blockquote>
8746 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8747 </blockquote></p>
8748
8749 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8750
8751 <pre>
8752  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8753  p    0001  (device product)
8754  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8755  dc     09  (device class)
8756  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8757  dp     00  (device protocol)
8758  ic     09  (interface class)
8759  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8760  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8761 </pre>
8762
8763 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8764 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8765 these alias entries show up:</p>
8766
8767 <p><blockquote>
8768 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8769 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8770 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8771 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8772 </blockquote></p>
8773
8774 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8775 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8776 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8777
8778 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8779
8780 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8781 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8782
8783 <p><blockquote>
8784 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8785 </blockquote></p>
8786
8787 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8788
8789 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8790
8791 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8792 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
8793 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
8794
8795 <p><blockquote>
8796 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
8797 </blockquote></p>
8798
8799 <p>The values present are</p>
8800
8801 <pre>
8802  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
8803  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
8804  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
8805  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
8806  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
8807  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
8808  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
8809  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
8810  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
8811  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
8812  ct   10             (chassis type)
8813  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
8814 </pre>
8815
8816 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
8817 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
8818
8819 <pre>
8820   3 Desktop
8821   4 Low Profile Desktop
8822   5 Pizza Box
8823   6 Mini Tower
8824   7 Tower
8825   8 Portable
8826   9 Laptop
8827  10 Notebook
8828  11 Hand Held
8829  12 Docking Station
8830  13 All In One
8831  14 Sub Notebook
8832  15 Space-saving
8833  16 Lunch Box
8834  17 Main Server Chassis
8835  18 Expansion Chassis
8836  19 Sub Chassis
8837  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
8838  21 Peripheral Chassis
8839  22 RAID Chassis
8840  23 Rack Mount Chassis
8841  24 Sealed-case PC
8842  25 Multi-system
8843  26 CompactPCI
8844  27 AdvancedTCA
8845  28 Blade
8846  29 Blade Enclosing
8847 </pre>
8848
8849 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
8850 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
8851 claim it is a desktop.</p>
8852
8853 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
8854
8855 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
8856 test machine:</p>
8857
8858 <p><blockquote>
8859 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
8860 </blockquote></p>
8861
8862 <p>The values present are</p>
8863
8864 <pre>
8865   ty  01  (type)
8866   pr  00  (prototype)
8867   id  00  (id)
8868   ex  00  (extra)
8869 </pre>
8870
8871 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
8872 the valid values are.</p>
8873
8874 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
8875
8876 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
8877 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
8878 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
8879 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
8880 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
8881 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
8882 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
8883
8884 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
8885
8886 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
8887 one can use the following shell script:</p>
8888
8889 <pre>
8890   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
8891     echo "$id" ; \
8892     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
8893   done
8894 </pre>
8895
8896 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
8897 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
8898
8899 <pre>
8900   acpi:ACPI0003:
8901     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
8902   acpi:device:
8903   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
8904   acpi:IBM0068:
8905     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
8906     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
8907     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
8908     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
8909   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8910     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
8911     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
8912     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
8913   [...]
8914 </pre>
8915
8916 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8917 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8918 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8919 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8920
8921 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
8922 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
8923 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
8924
8925       </div>
8926       <div class="tags">
8927
8928
8929         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8930
8931
8932       </div>
8933     </div>
8934     <div class="padding"></div>
8935
8936     <div class="entry">
8937       <div class="title">
8938         <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>
8939       </div>
8940       <div class="date">
8941         10th January 2013
8942       </div>
8943       <div class="body">
8944         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
8945 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
8946 Launcher and updated the Debian package
8947 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
8948 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
8949 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
8950 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
8951 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
8952 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
8953 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
8954 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
8955 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
8956 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
8957 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
8958 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
8959 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
8960 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
8961 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
8962
8963       </div>
8964       <div class="tags">
8965
8966
8967         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8968
8969
8970       </div>
8971     </div>
8972     <div class="padding"></div>
8973
8974     <div class="entry">
8975       <div class="title">
8976         <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>
8977       </div>
8978       <div class="date">
8979          9th January 2013
8980       </div>
8981       <div class="body">
8982         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
8983 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
8984 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
8985 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
8986 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
8987 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
8988 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
8989 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
8990 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
8991 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
8992 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
8993
8994 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
8995 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
8996 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
8997 simple:
8998
8999 <ul>
9000
9001 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
9002   starting when a user log in.</li>
9003
9004 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
9005   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
9006
9007 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
9008   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
9009   packages.</li>
9010
9011 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
9012   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
9013
9014 </ul>
9015
9016 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
9017 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
9018 discover database to find packages and
9019 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
9020 packages.</p>
9021
9022 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
9023 draft package is now checked into
9024 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9025 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
9026 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
9027 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
9028 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
9029 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
9030 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
9031 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
9032 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
9033 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
9034 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
9035 because of the freeze).</p>
9036
9037 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
9038 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
9039 inserted):</p>
9040
9041 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
9042
9043 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
9044 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
9045 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
9046
9047 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
9048 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
9049 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
9050 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
9051 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
9052 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
9053 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
9054
9055 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
9056 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
9057 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
9058 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
9059 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
9060 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
9061 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
9062 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
9063 not be installed?</p>
9064
9065 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
9066 please send me an email. :)</p>
9067
9068       </div>
9069       <div class="tags">
9070
9071
9072         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
9073
9074
9075       </div>
9076     </div>
9077     <div class="padding"></div>
9078
9079     <div class="entry">
9080       <div class="title">
9081         <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>
9082       </div>
9083       <div class="date">
9084          2nd January 2013
9085       </div>
9086       <div class="body">
9087         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
9088 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
9089 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
9090 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
9091 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
9092 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
9093 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
9094 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
9095 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
9096 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
9097
9098 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
9099 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
9100 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
9101
9102       </div>
9103       <div class="tags">
9104
9105
9106         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
9107
9108
9109       </div>
9110     </div>
9111     <div class="padding"></div>
9112
9113     <div class="entry">
9114       <div class="title">
9115         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9116       </div>
9117       <div class="date">
9118         28th December 2012
9119       </div>
9120       <div class="body">
9121         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
9122 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9123 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
9124 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
9125 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
9126 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
9127 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
9128 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
9129 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
9130 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
9131 followed by many others. :)</p>
9132
9133 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
9134 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
9135 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
9136 you want to donate to the project.</p>
9137
9138       </div>
9139       <div class="tags">
9140
9141
9142         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9143
9144
9145       </div>
9146     </div>
9147     <div class="padding"></div>
9148
9149     <div class="entry">
9150       <div class="title">
9151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
9152       </div>
9153       <div class="date">
9154         25th December 2012
9155       </div>
9156       <div class="body">
9157         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
9158 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
9159
9160 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
9161 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
9162 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
9163 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
9164 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
9165 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
9166 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
9167 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
9168 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
9169 name.</p>
9170
9171 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
9172 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
9173 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
9174
9175 <blockquote><pre>
9176 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
9177 cd bitcoin
9178 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
9179 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
9180 </pre></blockquote>
9181
9182 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
9183 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
9184 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
9185 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
9186 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
9187 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
9188 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
9189 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
9190 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
9191
9192 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9193 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9194 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9195
9196       </div>
9197       <div class="tags">
9198
9199
9200         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>.
9201
9202
9203       </div>
9204     </div>
9205     <div class="padding"></div>
9206
9207     <div class="entry">
9208       <div class="title">
9209         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
9210       </div>
9211       <div class="date">
9212         21st December 2012
9213       </div>
9214       <div class="body">
9215         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
9216 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
9217 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
9218 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
9219 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
9220 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
9221 is now maintained by a
9222 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
9223 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
9224 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
9225 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
9226 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
9227 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
9228 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
9229 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
9230 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
9231 Corallo in a
9232 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
9233 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
9234 Debian package.</p>
9235
9236 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
9237 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
9238 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
9239 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
9240 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
9241 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
9242 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
9243 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
9244 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
9245 new version to unstable.
9246
9247 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
9248 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
9249 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
9250 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
9251 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
9252 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
9253 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
9254 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
9255 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
9256 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
9257 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
9258 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
9259 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
9260 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
9261 have not tested them.</p>
9262
9263 <p>My
9264 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
9265 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
9266 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
9267 years ago, as can be
9268 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
9269 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
9270 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
9271 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
9272 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
9273 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
9274 the same address as last time,
9275 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9276
9277       </div>
9278       <div class="tags">
9279
9280
9281         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>.
9282
9283
9284       </div>
9285     </div>
9286     <div class="padding"></div>
9287
9288     <div class="entry">
9289       <div class="title">
9290         <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>
9291       </div>
9292       <div class="date">
9293         18th December 2012
9294       </div>
9295       <div class="body">
9296         <p>A few days ago I came across
9297 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
9298 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
9299 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
9300 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
9301 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
9302 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
9303 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
9304 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
9305 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
9306
9307 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
9308 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
9309 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
9310 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
9311
9312 <blockquote><pre>
9313 2004-05-27 Book Store
9314       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
9315       Liabilities:Visa
9316 </pre></blockquote>
9317
9318 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
9319 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
9320 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
9321 Spang</a>,
9322 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
9323 Keen</a>,
9324 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
9325 Cantino</a> and
9326 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
9327 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
9328 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
9329 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
9330 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
9331
9332 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
9333 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
9334 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
9335 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
9336 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
9337
9338 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
9339 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
9340 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
9341 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
9342 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
9343 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
9344 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
9345 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
9346 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
9347
9348       </div>
9349       <div class="tags">
9350
9351
9352         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
9353
9354
9355       </div>
9356     </div>
9357     <div class="padding"></div>
9358
9359     <div class="entry">
9360       <div class="title">
9361         <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>
9362       </div>
9363       <div class="date">
9364          6th December 2012
9365       </div>
9366       <div class="body">
9367         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
9368 Oslo</a>, we use the
9369 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
9370 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
9371 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
9372 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
9373 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
9374 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
9375 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
9376 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
9377 Python.</p>
9378
9379 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
9380 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
9381 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
9382 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
9383 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
9384 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
9385
9386 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
9387 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
9388 user currently logged in:</p>
9389
9390 <blockquote><pre>
9391 #!/usr/bin/env python
9392 import getpass
9393 import xmlrpclib
9394 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
9395 username = getpass.getuser()
9396 password = getpass.getpass()
9397 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
9398 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
9399 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
9400 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
9401 result = server.logout(sessionid)
9402 print result
9403 </pre></blockquote>
9404
9405 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
9406 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
9407
9408       </div>
9409       <div class="tags">
9410
9411
9412         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>.
9413
9414
9415       </div>
9416     </div>
9417     <div class="padding"></div>
9418
9419     <div class="entry">
9420       <div class="title">
9421         <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>
9422       </div>
9423       <div class="date">
9424         17th November 2012
9425       </div>
9426       <div class="body">
9427         <p>While working on a
9428 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
9429 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
9430 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
9431 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
9432 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
9433 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
9434
9435 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
9436 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
9437 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
9438 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
9439 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
9440 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
9441 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
9442 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
9443 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
9444 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
9445 arguments.</p>
9446
9447 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
9448 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
9449 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
9450 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
9451 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
9452 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
9453 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
9454 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
9455
9456 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
9457 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
9458 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
9459 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
9460 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
9461 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
9462 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
9463 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
9464 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
9465 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
9466 correct right holder.</p>
9467
9468 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
9469 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
9470 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
9471 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
9472 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
9473 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
9474 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
9475 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
9476 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
9477 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
9478 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
9479 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
9480 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
9481 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
9482
9483 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
9484 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
9485 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
9486
9487 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
9488 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
9489
9490       </div>
9491       <div class="tags">
9492
9493
9494         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>.
9495
9496
9497       </div>
9498     </div>
9499     <div class="padding"></div>
9500
9501     <div class="entry">
9502       <div class="title">
9503         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
9504       </div>
9505       <div class="date">
9506         14th November 2012
9507       </div>
9508       <div class="body">
9509         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
9510 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
9511 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
9512 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
9513 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
9514 the people behind the German
9515 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
9516 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
9517 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
9518
9519 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9520
9521 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
9522 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
9523 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
9524
9525 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
9526 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
9527 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
9528 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
9529 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
9530 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
9531
9532 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
9533 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
9534 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
9535 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
9536 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
9537 relationship management and the communication processes in the
9538 project.</p>
9539
9540 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
9541 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
9542 and a yoga teacher.</p>
9543
9544 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9545 project?</strong></p>
9546
9547 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
9548
9549 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
9550 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
9551 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
9552 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
9553 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
9554 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
9555 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
9556 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
9557 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
9558 parents.</p>
9559
9560 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
9561 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
9562 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
9563 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
9564 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
9565 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
9566 Germany.</p>
9567
9568 <p>For information about our school project you can read
9569 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
9570 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
9571
9572 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9573 Edu?</strong></p>
9574
9575 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
9576 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
9577
9578 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
9579 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
9580 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
9581 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
9582 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
9583 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
9584 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
9585 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
9586 teachers, parents...</p>
9587
9588 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9589 Edu?</strong></p>
9590
9591 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
9592 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9593
9594 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
9595 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
9596 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
9597 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
9598 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9599
9600 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
9601 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
9602 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
9603 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
9604 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
9605 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
9606 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9607
9608 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9609
9610 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
9611 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
9612 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
9613 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
9614
9615 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9616 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9617
9618 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
9619 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
9620 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
9621 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
9622 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
9623
9624 <ul>
9625
9626 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
9627 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
9628 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
9629
9630 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
9631 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
9632 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
9633 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
9634 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
9635 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
9636 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
9637
9638 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
9639 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
9640 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
9641 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
9642
9643 </ul>
9644
9645       </div>
9646       <div class="tags">
9647
9648
9649         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
9650
9651
9652       </div>
9653     </div>
9654     <div class="padding"></div>
9655
9656     <div class="entry">
9657       <div class="title">
9658         <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>
9659       </div>
9660       <div class="date">
9661          4th November 2012
9662       </div>
9663       <div class="body">
9664         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
9665 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
9666 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
9667 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
9668 see how a member of the bitcoin community
9669 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
9670 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
9671 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
9672 competition.  My thoughts go to the
9673 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
9674 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
9675 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
9676 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
9677 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
9678
9679 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
9680 that the community already seem to have
9681 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
9682 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
9683 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
9684 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
9685 wealth is available.</p>
9686
9687       </div>
9688       <div class="tags">
9689
9690
9691         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>.
9692
9693
9694       </div>
9695     </div>
9696     <div class="padding"></div>
9697
9698     <div class="entry">
9699       <div class="title">
9700         <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>
9701       </div>
9702       <div class="date">
9703         26th October 2012
9704       </div>
9705       <div class="body">
9706         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
9707 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
9708 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
9709 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
9710 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
9711 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
9712 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
9713 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
9714 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
9715 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
9716 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
9717 it every time.</p>
9718
9719 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
9720 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
9721 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
9722 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
9723 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
9724 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
9725 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
9726 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
9727 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
9728 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
9729 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
9730 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
9731
9732 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
9733 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
9734 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
9735 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
9736 article: First the unplanned outage:
9737
9738 <blockquote><pre>
9739 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
9740 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
9741 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
9742 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
9743 Duration:    40 minutes
9744 Scope:       Exchange 2003
9745 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
9746              a cluster failover.
9747
9748 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
9749              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
9750 Technician:  [xxx]
9751 </pre></blockquote>
9752
9753 Next the planned outage:
9754
9755 <blockquote><pre>
9756 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
9757 Severity:    Major (Planned)
9758 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
9759 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
9760 Duration:    10 hours
9761 Scope:       H2 Transport
9762 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
9763              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
9764              4510s.
9765 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
9766              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
9767              connectivity.
9768 Technician:  [xxx]
9769 </pre></blockquote>
9770
9771 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
9772 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
9773 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
9774 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
9775 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
9776 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
9777 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
9778
9779 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
9780 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
9781 university too.  We do register
9782 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
9783 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
9784 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
9785 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
9786 for other sites to consider too?</p>
9787
9788       </div>
9789       <div class="tags">
9790
9791
9792         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>.
9793
9794
9795       </div>
9796     </div>
9797     <div class="padding"></div>
9798
9799     <div class="entry">
9800       <div class="title">
9801         <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>
9802       </div>
9803       <div class="date">
9804         22nd October 2012
9805       </div>
9806       <div class="body">
9807         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
9808 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
9809 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
9810 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
9811 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
9812 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
9813 background information is available in Norwegian from
9814 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
9815 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
9816 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
9817 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
9818 willing to
9819 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
9820 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
9821 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
9822 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
9823 sounded like
9824 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
9825 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
9826 later.</p>
9827
9828 <p>And thought this action is
9829 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
9830 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
9831 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
9832 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
9833 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
9834 rights.</p>
9835
9836 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
9837 unacceptable terms.  For example
9838 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
9839 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
9840 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
9841 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
9842 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
9843
9844 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
9845 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
9846 restored the account of the user, as reported by
9847 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
9848 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
9849 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
9850 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
9851 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
9852 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
9853 reading two opinions from
9854 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
9855 Phipps</a> and
9856 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
9857 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
9858 details about the original story.</p>
9859
9860       </div>
9861       <div class="tags">
9862
9863
9864         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>.
9865
9866
9867       </div>
9868     </div>
9869     <div class="padding"></div>
9870
9871     <div class="entry">
9872       <div class="title">
9873         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
9874       </div>
9875       <div class="date">
9876         18th October 2012
9877       </div>
9878       <div class="body">
9879         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
9880 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
9881 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
9882 across a marvellous drawing by
9883 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
9884 visualising some of what is going on.
9885
9886 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
9887 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
9888
9889 <blockquote>
9890 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
9891 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
9892 </blockquote>
9893
9894 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
9895 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
9896 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
9897 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
9898 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
9899 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
9900
9901       </div>
9902       <div class="tags">
9903
9904
9905         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>.
9906
9907
9908       </div>
9909     </div>
9910     <div class="padding"></div>
9911
9912     <div class="entry">
9913       <div class="title">
9914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
9915       </div>
9916       <div class="date">
9917         12th October 2012
9918       </div>
9919       <div class="body">
9920         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
9921 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
9922 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
9923 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
9924 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
9925 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
9926 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
9927 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
9928 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
9929 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
9930 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
9931 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
9932 matter".</p>
9933
9934 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
9935 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
9936 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
9937 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
9938 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
9939 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
9940 to argue its side.</p>
9941
9942 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
9943 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
9944 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
9945 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
9946
9947 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
9948 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
9949 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
9950
9951       </div>
9952       <div class="tags">
9953
9954
9955         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>.
9956
9957
9958       </div>
9959     </div>
9960     <div class="padding"></div>
9961
9962     <div class="entry">
9963       <div class="title">
9964         <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>
9965       </div>
9966       <div class="date">
9967          3rd October 2012
9968       </div>
9969       <div class="body">
9970         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
9971 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
9972 the computer science book collection available in his local
9973 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
9974 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
9975 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
9976 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
9977 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
9978 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
9979 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
9980 recently published books.</p>
9981
9982 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
9983 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
9984 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
9985 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
9986 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
9987 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
9988 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
9989 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
9990 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
9991 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
9992 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
9993 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
9994 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
9995 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
9996 for the library that evening.</p>
9997
9998 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
9999 going to know that for example
10000 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
10001 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
10002 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
10003 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
10004 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
10005 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
10006 book right away.</p>
10007
10008       </div>
10009       <div class="tags">
10010
10011
10012         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10013
10014
10015       </div>
10016     </div>
10017     <div class="padding"></div>
10018
10019     <div class="entry">
10020       <div class="title">
10021         <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>
10022       </div>
10023       <div class="date">
10024         23rd September 2012
10025       </div>
10026       <div class="body">
10027         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
10028 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
10029 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10030 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
10031 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
10032 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
10033
10034 When I started, I
10035 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10036 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
10037 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
10038 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
10039 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
10040 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
10041 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
10042
10043 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10044
10045 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
10046 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
10047 the project files currently available from
10048 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10049
10050 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10051 the updated
10052 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10053 and
10054 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10055 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10056 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10057 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10058
10059       </div>
10060       <div class="tags">
10061
10062
10063         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>.
10064
10065
10066       </div>
10067     </div>
10068     <div class="padding"></div>
10069
10070     <div class="entry">
10071       <div class="title">
10072         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
10073       </div>
10074       <div class="date">
10075         17th September 2012
10076       </div>
10077       <div class="body">
10078         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
10079 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10080 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
10081 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
10082 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
10083 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
10084 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
10085
10086 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10087
10088 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
10089 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
10090 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
10091 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
10092 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
10093 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
10094 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
10095 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
10096 training is anyway very important</p>
10097
10098 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
10099 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
10100 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
10101 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
10102 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
10103
10104 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10105 project?</strong></p>
10106
10107 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
10108 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
10109 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
10110 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
10111 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
10112 hole.</p>
10113
10114 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10115 Edu?</strong></p>
10116
10117 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
10118 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
10119 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
10120 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
10121 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
10122 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
10123 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
10124 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
10125 hassle.</p>
10126
10127 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10128 Edu?</strong></p>
10129
10130 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
10131 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
10132 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
10133 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
10134 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
10135 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
10136 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
10137 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
10138
10139 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10140
10141 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
10142 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
10143 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
10144 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
10145 has the same...</p>
10146
10147 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
10148 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
10149 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
10150 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
10151
10152 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10153 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10154
10155 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
10156 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
10157 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
10158
10159 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
10160 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
10161 don't.</p>
10162
10163 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
10164 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
10165 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
10166 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
10167 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
10168 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
10169 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
10170
10171       </div>
10172       <div class="tags">
10173
10174
10175         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10176
10177
10178       </div>
10179     </div>
10180     <div class="padding"></div>
10181
10182     <div class="entry">
10183       <div class="title">
10184         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
10185       </div>
10186       <div class="date">
10187         15th September 2012
10188       </div>
10189       <div class="body">
10190         <p>After the
10191 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
10192 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
10193 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
10194 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
10195 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
10196 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
10197 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
10198 was
10199 <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
10200 formal working group should be formed.</p>
10201
10202 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
10203 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
10204 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
10205 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
10206 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
10207 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
10208 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
10209 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
10210
10211 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
10212 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
10213 IETF.</p>
10214
10215       </div>
10216       <div class="tags">
10217
10218
10219         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>.
10220
10221
10222       </div>
10223     </div>
10224     <div class="padding"></div>
10225
10226     <div class="entry">
10227       <div class="title">
10228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
10229       </div>
10230       <div class="date">
10231         12th September 2012
10232       </div>
10233       <div class="body">
10234         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
10235 publication of of
10236 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
10237 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
10238 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
10239 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
10240 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
10241 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
10242 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
10243 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
10244 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
10245 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
10246
10247 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
10248 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
10249 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
10250 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
10251
10252 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
10253 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
10254
10255       </div>
10256       <div class="tags">
10257
10258
10259         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>.
10260
10261
10262       </div>
10263     </div>
10264     <div class="padding"></div>
10265
10266     <div class="entry">
10267       <div class="title">
10268         <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>
10269       </div>
10270       <div class="date">
10271          7th September 2012
10272       </div>
10273       <div class="body">
10274         <p>As I
10275 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
10276 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
10277 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
10278 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
10279 repository for the project</a>.</p>
10280
10281 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
10282 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
10283 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
10284 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
10285
10286 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
10287 PostScript formats at
10288 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
10289 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
10290
10291       </div>
10292       <div class="tags">
10293
10294
10295         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
10296
10297
10298       </div>
10299     </div>
10300     <div class="padding"></div>
10301
10302     <div class="entry">
10303       <div class="title">
10304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
10305       </div>
10306       <div class="date">
10307         23rd August 2012
10308       </div>
10309       <div class="body">
10310         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
10311 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
10312 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
10313 revisit the great site
10314 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
10315 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
10316 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
10317
10318       </div>
10319       <div class="tags">
10320
10321
10322         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>.
10323
10324
10325       </div>
10326     </div>
10327     <div class="padding"></div>
10328
10329     <div class="entry">
10330       <div class="title">
10331         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture</a>
10332       </div>
10333       <div class="date">
10334         17th August 2012
10335       </div>
10336       <div class="body">
10337         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
10338 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
10339 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
10340 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
10341 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
10342 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
10343 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
10344 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
10345 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
10346 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
10347 summer I
10348 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10349 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
10350 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
10351
10352 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
10353 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
10354 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
10355 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
10356 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
10357 progress:</p>
10358
10359 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10360
10361 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
10362 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
10363 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
10364 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
10365 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
10366 english version of the docbook source.</p>
10367
10368 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
10369 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
10370 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
10371 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
10372 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
10373 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
10374 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
10375 project files currently available from <a
10376 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10377
10378 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10379 the updated
10380 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10381 and
10382 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10383 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10384 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10385 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10386
10387       </div>
10388       <div class="tags">
10389
10390
10391         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>.
10392
10393
10394       </div>
10395     </div>
10396     <div class="padding"></div>
10397
10398     <div class="entry">
10399       <div class="title">
10400         <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>
10401       </div>
10402       <div class="date">
10403         10th August 2012
10404       </div>
10405       <div class="body">
10406         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
10407 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
10408 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
10409 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
10410 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
10411 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
10412 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
10413 case for the language
10414 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
10415 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
10416
10417 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
10418 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
10419 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
10420 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
10421 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
10422
10423 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
10424 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
10425 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
10426 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
10427 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
10428 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
10429 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
10430 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
10431 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
10432 alias for 'nb'.</p>
10433
10434 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
10435 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
10436 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
10437 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
10438 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
10439 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
10440 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
10441 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
10442 at the same time. :(</p>
10443
10444 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
10445 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
10446 processors. :(</p>
10447
10448 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
10449
10450       </div>
10451       <div class="tags">
10452
10453
10454         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>.
10455
10456
10457       </div>
10458     </div>
10459     <div class="padding"></div>
10460
10461     <div class="entry">
10462       <div class="title">
10463         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
10464       </div>
10465       <div class="date">
10466         31st July 2012
10467       </div>
10468       <div class="body">
10469         <p>I tried to send this text to the
10470 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
10471 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
10472 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
10473 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
10474 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
10475 out.</p>
10476
10477 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
10478 learning curve at the moment.</p>
10479
10480 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
10481 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
10482 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
10483 available from
10484 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
10485 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
10486 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
10487 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
10488 Squeeze.</p>
10489
10490 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
10491 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
10492 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
10493 problems.</p>
10494
10495 <ul>
10496
10497 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
10498    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
10499    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
10500    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
10501    index references spanning several pages (See
10502    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
10503    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
10504    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
10505
10506 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
10507    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
10508    #683163</a>).</li>
10509
10510 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
10511    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
10512    footnote and text body, see
10513    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
10514    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
10515    refs listed are not right).</li>
10516
10517 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
10518
10519 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
10520    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
10521
10522 </ul>
10523
10524 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
10525 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
10526 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
10527
10528 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
10529
10530       </div>
10531       <div class="tags">
10532
10533
10534         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>.
10535
10536
10537       </div>
10538     </div>
10539     <div class="padding"></div>
10540
10541     <div class="entry">
10542       <div class="title">
10543         <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>
10544       </div>
10545       <div class="date">
10546         21st July 2012
10547       </div>
10548       <div class="body">
10549         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
10550 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
10551 norwegian version</a> of the book
10552 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10553 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
10554 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
10555 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
10556 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10557
10558 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
10559 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
10560 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
10561 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
10562 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
10563 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
10564 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
10565 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
10566 print. :)</p>
10567
10568 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
10569 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
10570 language.</p>
10571
10572       </div>
10573       <div class="tags">
10574
10575
10576         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>.
10577
10578
10579       </div>
10580     </div>
10581     <div class="padding"></div>
10582
10583     <div class="entry">
10584       <div class="title">
10585         <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>
10586       </div>
10587       <div class="date">
10588         16th July 2012
10589       </div>
10590       <div class="body">
10591         <p>I am currently working on a
10592 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
10593 to translate</a> the book
10594 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
10595 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
10596 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
10597 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
10598 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
10599 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
10600 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10601
10602 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
10603 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
10604 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
10605 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
10606 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
10607 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
10608 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
10609 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
10610 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
10611
10612       </div>
10613       <div class="tags">
10614
10615
10616         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>.
10617
10618
10619       </div>
10620     </div>
10621     <div class="padding"></div>
10622
10623     <div class="entry">
10624       <div class="title">
10625         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
10626       </div>
10627       <div class="date">
10628          9th July 2012
10629       </div>
10630       <div class="body">
10631         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10632 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
10633 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
10634 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
10635 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
10636 to adjust and scale the just released
10637 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
10638 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
10639 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
10640
10641 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10642
10643 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
10644 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
10645 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
10646 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
10647 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
10648 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
10649 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
10650 perspective when working with IT.</p>
10651
10652 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10653 project?</strong></p>
10654
10655 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
10656 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
10657 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
10658 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
10659 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
10660 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
10661
10662 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10663 Edu?</strong></p>
10664
10665 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
10666 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
10667 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
10668 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
10669 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
10670 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
10671 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
10672 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
10673 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
10674 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
10675 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
10676 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
10677 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
10678 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
10679 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
10680 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
10681 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
10682 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
10683 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
10684 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
10685 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
10686 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
10687 quicker to update.
10688
10689 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10690 Edu?</strong></p>
10691
10692 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
10693 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
10694 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
10695 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
10696 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
10697 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
10698
10699 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
10700 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
10701 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
10702 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
10703 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
10704 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
10705 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
10706 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
10707 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
10708 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
10709 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
10710 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
10711 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
10712 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
10713 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
10714
10715 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
10716 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
10717 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
10718 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
10719 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
10720 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
10721 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
10722 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
10723
10724 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
10725 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
10726 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
10727 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
10728 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
10729 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
10730 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
10731 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
10732 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
10733 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
10734 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
10735 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
10736 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
10737 sound file.</p>
10738
10739 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
10740 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
10741 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
10742 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
10743 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
10744 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
10745 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
10746 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
10747 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
10748
10749 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10750
10751 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
10752 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
10753 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
10754 )</p>
10755
10756 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10757 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10758
10759 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
10760 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
10761 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
10762 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
10763 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
10764 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
10765 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
10766 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
10767 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
10768 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
10769 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
10770 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
10771 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
10772 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
10773 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
10774
10775 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
10776 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
10777 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
10778 management with Airtime</a>,
10779 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
10780 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
10781 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
10782 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
10783 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
10784
10785       </div>
10786       <div class="tags">
10787
10788
10789         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10790
10791
10792       </div>
10793     </div>
10794     <div class="padding"></div>
10795
10796     <div class="entry">
10797       <div class="title">
10798         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
10799       </div>
10800       <div class="date">
10801          8th July 2012
10802       </div>
10803       <div class="body">
10804         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
10805 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
10806 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
10807 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
10808 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
10809 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
10810 Steinberg in his blog post
10811 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
10812 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
10813 spending of your tax money.</p>
10814
10815 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
10816 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
10817 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
10818 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
10819 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
10820 purchases.</p>
10821
10822       </div>
10823       <div class="tags">
10824
10825
10826         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10827
10828
10829       </div>
10830     </div>
10831     <div class="padding"></div>
10832
10833     <div class="entry">
10834       <div class="title">
10835         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
10836       </div>
10837       <div class="date">
10838          7th July 2012
10839       </div>
10840       <div class="body">
10841         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10842 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
10843 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
10844 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
10845 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
10846 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
10847 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
10848 receive.  The software is
10849
10850 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
10851 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
10852 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
10853 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
10854 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
10855 Windows</a>.</p>
10856
10857 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
10858 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
10859
10860 <p><ul>
10861
10862   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
10863     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
10864
10865   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
10866     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
10867     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
10868     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
10869     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
10870     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
10871     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
10872     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
10873     </li>
10874
10875   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
10876     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
10877
10878   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
10879     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
10880
10881   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
10882     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
10883
10884   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
10885
10886   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
10887     formats </li>
10888
10889   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
10890     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
10891     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
10892     (as separate sets)</li>
10893
10894   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
10895     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
10896     percentage)</li>
10897
10898   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
10899     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
10900     memory):
10901     <ul>
10902       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
10903       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
10904       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
10905       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
10906       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
10907       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
10908       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
10909       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
10910       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
10911       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
10912           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
10913           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
10914           activity)</li>
10915       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
10916       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
10917     </ul></li>
10918
10919   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
10920     <ul>
10921       <li>Break periods</li>
10922       <li>For teacher(s):
10923         <ul>
10924           <li>Not available periods</li>
10925           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
10926           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
10927           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
10928           <li>Min hours daily</li>
10929           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
10930
10931           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
10932             days per week</li>
10933         </ul></li>
10934       <li>For students (sets):
10935         <ul>
10936           <li>Not available periods</li>
10937           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
10938           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
10939           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
10940           <li>Min hours daily</li>
10941           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
10942
10943           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
10944             days per week</li>
10945         </ul></li>
10946       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
10947         <ul>
10948           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
10949           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
10950           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
10951           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
10952           <li>End(s) students day</li>
10953           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
10954           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
10955             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
10956           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
10957           <li>Not overlapping</li>
10958           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
10959           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
10960         </ul></li>
10961     </ul></li>
10962
10963   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
10964     <ul>
10965       <li>Room not available periods</li>
10966       <li>For teacher(s):
10967         <ul>
10968           <li>Home room(s)</li>
10969           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
10970           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
10971         </ul>
10972       </li>
10973
10974       <li>For students (sets):
10975         <ul>
10976           <li>Home room(s)</li>
10977           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
10978           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
10979         </ul>
10980       </li>
10981       <li>Preferred room(s):
10982         <ul>
10983           <li>For a subject</li>
10984           <li>For an activity tag</li>
10985           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
10986           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
10987         </ul>
10988       </li>
10989
10990       <li>For a set of activities:
10991         <ul>
10992           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
10993         </ul>
10994       </li>
10995     </ul>
10996   </li>
10997 </ul></p>
10998
10999 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
11000 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
11001 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
11002 manually, check it out.
11003
11004 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
11005 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
11006 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
11007 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
11008 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
11009 section</a>.</p>
11010
11011       </div>
11012       <div class="tags">
11013
11014
11015         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11016
11017
11018       </div>
11019     </div>
11020     <div class="padding"></div>
11021
11022     <div class="entry">
11023       <div class="title">
11024         <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>
11025       </div>
11026       <div class="date">
11027          3rd July 2012
11028       </div>
11029       <div class="body">
11030         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
11031 project (Norwegian version of
11032 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
11033 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
11034 a problem with the municipalities using
11035 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
11036 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
11037 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
11038 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
11039 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
11040 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
11041 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
11042 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
11043 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
11044 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
11045 the From: header.</p>
11046
11047 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
11048 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
11049 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
11050 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
11051 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
11052 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
11053 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
11054 behaviour.</p>
11055
11056 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
11057 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
11058 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
11059 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
11060 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
11061 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
11062 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
11063
11064       </div>
11065       <div class="tags">
11066
11067
11068         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>.
11069
11070
11071       </div>
11072     </div>
11073     <div class="padding"></div>
11074
11075     <div class="entry">
11076       <div class="title">
11077         <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>
11078       </div>
11079       <div class="date">
11080         26th June 2012
11081       </div>
11082       <div class="body">
11083         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
11084 another interview with the people behind
11085 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
11086 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
11087 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
11088 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
11089 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
11090 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11091 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
11092
11093 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11094
11095 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
11096 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
11097 ICT in schools</p>
11098
11099 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11100 project?</strong></p>
11101
11102 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
11103 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
11104 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
11105 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
11106
11107 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11108 Edu?</strong></p>
11109
11110 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
11111 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
11112 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
11113 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
11114
11115 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11116 Edu?</strong></p>
11117
11118 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
11119 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
11120 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
11121 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
11122 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
11123 technologies in school.</p>
11124
11125 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11126
11127 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
11128 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
11129 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
11130
11131 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11132 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11133
11134 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
11135 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
11136 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
11137 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
11138
11139 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
11140 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
11141 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
11142
11143 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
11144 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
11145 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
11146 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
11147 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
11148 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
11149 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
11150 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
11151 working there.</p>
11152
11153       </div>
11154       <div class="tags">
11155
11156
11157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11158
11159
11160       </div>
11161     </div>
11162     <div class="padding"></div>
11163
11164     <div class="entry">
11165       <div class="title">
11166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11167       </div>
11168       <div class="date">
11169         24th June 2012
11170       </div>
11171       <div class="body">
11172         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
11173 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
11174 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
11175 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
11176 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
11177 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
11178 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
11179 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
11180 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
11181 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
11182 missing in my book.</p>
11183
11184 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
11185 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
11186 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
11187 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
11188 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
11189 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
11190 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
11191
11192       </div>
11193       <div class="tags">
11194
11195
11196         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
11197
11198
11199       </div>
11200     </div>
11201     <div class="padding"></div>
11202
11203     <div class="entry">
11204       <div class="title">
11205         <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>
11206       </div>
11207       <div class="date">
11208         11th June 2012
11209       </div>
11210       <div class="body">
11211         <p>During my work on
11212 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
11213 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
11214 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
11215 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
11216 explanation.</p>
11217
11218 <p><ul>
11219
11220 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
11221 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
11222 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
11223 system depend on tasksel tasks in
11224 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
11225 installation.</li>
11226
11227 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
11228 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
11229 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
11230 at least try to enable it for these services:
11231 <ul>
11232
11233   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
11234     quotas.</li>
11235   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
11236   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
11237   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
11238   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
11239   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
11240
11241 </ul></li>
11242
11243 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
11244 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
11245 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
11246 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
11247
11248 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
11249 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
11250 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
11251
11252 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
11253 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
11254 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
11255 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
11256 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
11257 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
11258
11259 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
11260 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
11261 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
11262 in Wheezy.
11263
11264 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
11265 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
11266 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
11267
11268 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
11269 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
11270 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
11271 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
11272
11273 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
11274 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
11275 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
11276 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
11277
11278 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
11279 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
11280 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
11281
11282 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
11283 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
11284 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
11285
11286 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
11287 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
11288 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
11289 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
11290 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
11291
11292 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
11293 <ul>
11294
11295 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
11296 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
11297 <li>and probably more?</li>
11298 </ul></li>
11299
11300 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
11301 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
11302 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
11303 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
11304 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
11305 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
11306 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
11307 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
11308
11309
11310 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
11311 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
11312 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
11313 use.</li>
11314
11315 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
11316 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
11317 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
11318 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
11319 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
11320
11321 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
11322 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
11323 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
11324 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
11325 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
11326 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
11327
11328 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
11329 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
11330 There are at least three implementations,
11331 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
11332 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
11333 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
11334 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
11335 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
11336 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
11337 given room.</li>
11338
11339 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
11340 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
11341 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
11342 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
11343 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
11344 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
11345 investigated.</li>
11346
11347 </ul></p>
11348
11349 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
11350 version.</p>
11351
11352       </div>
11353       <div class="tags">
11354
11355
11356         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11357
11358
11359       </div>
11360     </div>
11361     <div class="padding"></div>
11362
11363     <div class="entry">
11364       <div class="title">
11365         <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>
11366       </div>
11367       <div class="date">
11368          9th June 2012
11369       </div>
11370       <div class="body">
11371         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
11372 <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
11373 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
11374 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
11375 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
11376 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
11377 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
11378 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
11379 be willing to pay for.</p>
11380
11381 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
11382 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
11383 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
11384 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
11385 Orwell</a>.</p>
11386
11387       </div>
11388       <div class="tags">
11389
11390
11391         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>.
11392
11393
11394       </div>
11395     </div>
11396     <div class="padding"></div>
11397
11398     <div class="entry">
11399       <div class="title">
11400         <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>
11401       </div>
11402       <div class="date">
11403          6th June 2012
11404       </div>
11405       <div class="body">
11406         <p>A few days ago
11407 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
11408 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
11409 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
11410 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
11411 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
11412 code for HP, Dell and IBM
11413 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
11414 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
11415 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
11416 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
11417 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
11418
11419 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
11420 output:
11421
11422 <blockquote><pre>
11423 % 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>
11424 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": ""})
11425 %
11426 </pre></blockquote>
11427
11428 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
11429 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
11430 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
11431
11432       </div>
11433       <div class="tags">
11434
11435
11436         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>.
11437
11438
11439       </div>
11440     </div>
11441     <div class="padding"></div>
11442
11443     <div class="entry">
11444       <div class="title">
11445         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
11446       </div>
11447       <div class="date">
11448          2nd June 2012
11449       </div>
11450       <div class="body">
11451         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
11452 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11453 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
11454 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
11455 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11456 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
11457
11458 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11459
11460 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
11461 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
11462 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
11463 by Angela).</p>
11464
11465 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
11466 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
11467 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
11468 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
11469 becoming an osteopath.</p>
11470
11471 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
11472 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
11473 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
11474 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
11475 skills with communication skills.</p>
11476
11477 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11478 project?</strong></p>
11479
11480 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
11481 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
11482 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
11483 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
11484 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
11485
11486 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
11487 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
11488 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
11489 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
11490 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
11491 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
11492 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
11493 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
11494 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
11495
11496 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
11497 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
11498 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
11499
11500 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
11501
11502 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
11503 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
11504 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
11505 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
11506 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
11507 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
11508 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
11509 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
11510 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
11511 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
11512 point.</p>
11513
11514 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
11515 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
11516 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
11517 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
11518 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
11519 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
11520
11521 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
11522 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
11523 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
11524 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
11525 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
11526 spare time.</p>
11527
11528 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
11529 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
11530 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
11531 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
11532 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
11533
11534 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
11535 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
11536 avoidance do exist.</p>
11537
11538 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
11539 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
11540 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
11541 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
11542 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
11543 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
11544 and probably a gain for all.</p>
11545
11546 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11547 Edu?</strong></p>
11548
11549 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
11550 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
11551 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
11552 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
11553 project communication, honest communication within the group of
11554 developers, etc.</p>
11555
11556 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11557 Edu?</strong></p>
11558
11559 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
11560
11561 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
11562 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
11563 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
11564 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
11565 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
11566 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
11567 contribute).</p>
11568
11569 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
11570 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
11571 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
11572 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
11573 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
11574 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
11575 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
11576 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
11577 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
11578 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
11579
11580 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11581
11582 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
11583
11584 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
11585 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
11586 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
11587
11588 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
11589 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
11590 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
11591 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
11592
11593 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
11594 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
11595 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
11596 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
11597 whiteboard.</p>
11598
11599 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
11600
11601 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11602 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11603
11604 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
11605 enrol people.</p>
11606
11607       </div>
11608       <div class="tags">
11609
11610
11611         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11612
11613
11614       </div>
11615     </div>
11616     <div class="padding"></div>
11617
11618     <div class="entry">
11619       <div class="title">
11620         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
11621       </div>
11622       <div class="date">
11623          1st June 2012
11624       </div>
11625       <div class="body">
11626         <p>A few years ago I wrote
11627 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
11628 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
11629 I have learned from colleges here at the
11630 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
11631 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
11632 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
11633 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
11634 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
11635
11636 <p><pre>
11637 use strict;
11638 use warnings;
11639 use SOAP::Lite;
11640 use Data::Dumper;
11641 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
11642 my $App = 'test';
11643 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
11644 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
11645 my $s = SOAP::Lite
11646     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
11647     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
11648     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
11649     ;
11650 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
11651     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
11652     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
11653     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
11654 );
11655 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
11656 </pre></p>
11657
11658 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
11659
11660 <p><pre>
11661 $VAR1 = {
11662           'Asset' => {
11663                      'Entitlements' => {
11664                                        'EntitlementData' => [
11665                                                             {
11666                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11667                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
11668                                                               'Provider' => '',
11669                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11670                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11671                                                             },
11672                                                             {
11673                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11674                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
11675                                                               'Provider' => '',
11676                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11677                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11678                                                             },
11679                                                             {
11680                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11681                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
11682                                                               'Provider' => '',
11683                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11684                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11685                                                             }
11686                                                           ]
11687                                      },
11688                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
11689                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
11690                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
11691                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
11692                                           'Buid' => '2323',
11693                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
11694                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
11695                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
11696                                         }
11697                    }
11698         };
11699 </pre></p>
11700
11701 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
11702 service outside the
11703 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
11704 documentation</a>, and according to
11705 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
11706 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
11707 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
11708
11709 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
11710 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
11711
11712       </div>
11713       <div class="tags">
11714
11715
11716         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>.
11717
11718
11719       </div>
11720     </div>
11721     <div class="padding"></div>
11722
11723     <div class="entry">
11724       <div class="title">
11725         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
11726       </div>
11727       <div class="date">
11728         31st May 2012
11729       </div>
11730       <div class="body">
11731         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
11732 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
11733 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
11734 running Debian Squeeze, where
11735 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
11736 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
11737 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
11738 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
11739 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
11740 another day.</p>
11741
11742 <p>After calibration, I get a
11743 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
11744 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
11745 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
11746 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
11747 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
11748 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
11749 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
11750 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
11751 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
11752 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
11753 and a simple</p>
11754
11755 <p><pre>
11756 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
11757 </pre></p>
11758
11759 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
11760 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
11761 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
11762 enough for now.</p>
11763
11764       </div>
11765       <div class="tags">
11766
11767
11768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11769
11770
11771       </div>
11772     </div>
11773     <div class="padding"></div>
11774
11775     <div class="entry">
11776       <div class="title">
11777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
11778       </div>
11779       <div class="date">
11780         27th May 2012
11781       </div>
11782       <div class="body">
11783         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
11784 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11785 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
11786 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
11787 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
11788 since then, helping to make sure the
11789 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11790 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
11791
11792 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11793
11794 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
11795 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
11796 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
11797 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
11798 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
11799 our computer network.</p>
11800
11801 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
11802 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
11803 (4 months).</p>
11804
11805 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11806 project?</strong></p>
11807
11808 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
11809 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
11810 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
11811 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
11812 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
11813 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
11814 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
11815 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
11816 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
11817 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
11818 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
11819 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
11820 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
11821 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
11822
11823 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11824 Edu?</strong></p>
11825
11826 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
11827 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
11828 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
11829 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
11830 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
11831 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
11832 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
11833 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
11834
11835 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11836 Edu?</strong></p>
11837
11838 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
11839 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
11840 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
11841 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
11842 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
11843 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
11844 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
11845 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
11846 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
11847 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
11848 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
11849 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
11850
11851 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11852
11853 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
11854 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
11855 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
11856
11857 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11858 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11859
11860 <p><ol>
11861
11862 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
11863 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
11864 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
11865 developing.</li>
11866
11867 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
11868 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
11869 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
11870 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
11871 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
11872
11873 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
11874 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
11875 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
11876
11877 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
11878 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
11879 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
11880 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
11881
11882 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
11883 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
11884 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
11885
11886 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
11887
11888 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
11889 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
11890 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
11891 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
11892
11893 </ol></p>
11894
11895       </div>
11896       <div class="tags">
11897
11898
11899         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11900
11901
11902       </div>
11903     </div>
11904     <div class="padding"></div>
11905
11906     <div class="entry">
11907       <div class="title">
11908         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
11909       </div>
11910       <div class="date">
11911         26th May 2012
11912       </div>
11913       <div class="body">
11914         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
11915 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
11916 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
11917 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
11918 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
11919
11920 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
11921 <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>
11922 comment:</p>
11923
11924 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
11925 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
11926 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
11927 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
11928 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
11929 </blockquote></p>
11930
11931 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
11932 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
11933 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
11934 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
11935 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
11936 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
11937 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
11938 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
11939 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
11940 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
11941 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
11942 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
11943 of wasted effort.</p>
11944
11945 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
11946 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
11947 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
11948
11949 <p>See
11950 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
11951 and
11952 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
11953 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
11954 </blockquote></p>
11955
11956       </div>
11957       <div class="tags">
11958
11959
11960         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>.
11961
11962
11963       </div>
11964     </div>
11965     <div class="padding"></div>
11966
11967     <div class="entry">
11968       <div class="title">
11969         <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>
11970       </div>
11971       <div class="date">
11972         18th May 2012
11973       </div>
11974       <div class="body">
11975         <p>In january, I
11976 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
11977 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
11978 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
11979 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
11980 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
11981 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
11982 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
11983 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
11984 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
11985 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
11986
11987 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
11988 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
11989 drivers. :)</p>
11990
11991       </div>
11992       <div class="tags">
11993
11994
11995         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11996
11997
11998       </div>
11999     </div>
12000     <div class="padding"></div>
12001
12002     <div class="entry">
12003       <div class="title">
12004         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
12005       </div>
12006       <div class="date">
12007         13th May 2012
12008       </div>
12009       <div class="body">
12010         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
12011 publish another interview with the people behind
12012 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
12013 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
12014 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
12015 details get right before release.
12016
12017 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12018
12019 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
12020 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
12021 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
12022 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
12023 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
12024 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
12025 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
12026 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
12027
12028 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
12029 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
12030 home since 2006.</p>
12031
12032 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12033 project?</strong></p>
12034
12035 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
12036 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
12037 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
12038 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
12039 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
12040 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
12041
12042 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
12043 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
12044 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
12045 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
12046 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
12047 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
12048 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
12049 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
12050 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
12051 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
12052 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
12053 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
12054 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
12055 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
12056 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
12057 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
12058
12059 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12060 Edu?</strong></p>
12061
12062 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
12063 for me as today.</p>
12064
12065 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
12066
12067 <p><ul>
12068
12069 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
12070 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
12071
12072 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
12073 cost.</li>
12074
12075 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
12076 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
12077 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
12078 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
12079 server</li>
12080
12081 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
12082 school.</li>
12083
12084 </ul></p>
12085
12086 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
12087 came up in this way:</p>
12088
12089 <p><ul>
12090
12091 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
12092 now.</li>
12093
12094 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
12095 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
12096 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
12097
12098 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
12099 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
12100 interfaces used in the past.</li>
12101
12102 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
12103 different needs.</li>
12104
12105 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
12106
12107 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
12108 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
12109 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
12110
12111 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
12112 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
12113
12114 </ul></p>
12115
12116 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12117 Edu?</strong></p>
12118
12119 <p><ul>
12120
12121 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
12122 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
12123 whole municipality areas.</li>
12124
12125 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
12126 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
12127 politicians.</li>
12128
12129 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
12130
12131 </ul></p>
12132
12133 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12134
12135 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
12136 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
12137 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
12138 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
12139 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
12140 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
12141
12142 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
12143 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
12144 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
12145 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
12146 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
12147
12148 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12149 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12150
12151 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
12152 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
12153 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
12154
12155       </div>
12156       <div class="tags">
12157
12158
12159         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12160
12161
12162       </div>
12163     </div>
12164     <div class="padding"></div>
12165
12166     <div class="entry">
12167       <div class="title">
12168         <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>
12169       </div>
12170       <div class="date">
12171         30th April 2012
12172       </div>
12173       <div class="body">
12174         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
12175 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
12176
12177 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
12178 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
12179 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
12180 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
12181 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
12182 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
12183 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
12184 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
12185 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
12186 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
12187 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
12188 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
12189 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
12190 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
12191 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
12192 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
12193
12194 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
12195 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
12196 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
12197 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
12198 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
12199 finally found a Danish supplier
12200 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
12201 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
12202 days ago.</p>
12203
12204 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
12205 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
12206 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
12207 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
12208 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
12209 toys.</p>
12210
12211       </div>
12212       <div class="tags">
12213
12214
12215         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12216
12217
12218       </div>
12219     </div>
12220     <div class="padding"></div>
12221
12222     <div class="entry">
12223       <div class="title">
12224         <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>
12225       </div>
12226       <div class="date">
12227         26th April 2012
12228       </div>
12229       <div class="body">
12230         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
12231 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
12232 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
12233 that the video editor application included with
12234 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
12235 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
12236 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
12237
12238 <p><blockquote>
12239 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
12240 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
12241 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
12242 </blockquote></p>
12243
12244 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
12245
12246 <p><blockquote>
12247 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
12248 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
12249 </blockquote></p>
12250
12251 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
12252 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
12253 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
12254 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
12255 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
12256 video.  AMR is
12257 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
12258 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
12259 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
12260 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
12261 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
12262 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
12263 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
12264
12265 <p>I know why I prefer
12266 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
12267 standards</a> also for video.</p>
12268
12269       </div>
12270       <div class="tags">
12271
12272
12273         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12274
12275
12276       </div>
12277     </div>
12278     <div class="padding"></div>
12279
12280     <div class="entry">
12281       <div class="title">
12282         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
12283       </div>
12284       <div class="date">
12285         19th April 2012
12286       </div>
12287       <div class="body">
12288         <p>Here in Norway, the
12289 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
12290 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
12291 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
12292 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
12293 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
12294 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
12295 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
12296 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
12297 on the same level.</p>
12298
12299 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
12300 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
12301 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
12302 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
12303 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
12304 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
12305 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
12306 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
12307 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
12308 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
12309 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
12310 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
12311 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
12312 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
12313 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
12314 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
12315 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
12316 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
12317
12318 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
12319 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
12320 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
12321 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
12322 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
12323 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
12324 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
12325 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
12326
12327 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
12328 from Simon Phipps
12329 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
12330 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
12331
12332 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
12333 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
12334 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
12335 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
12336 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
12337 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
12338 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
12339 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
12340 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
12341
12342       </div>
12343       <div class="tags">
12344
12345
12346         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>.
12347
12348
12349       </div>
12350     </div>
12351     <div class="padding"></div>
12352
12353     <div class="entry">
12354       <div class="title">
12355         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
12356       </div>
12357       <div class="date">
12358         15th April 2012
12359       </div>
12360       <div class="body">
12361         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
12362 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
12363 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
12364 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
12365 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
12366 up in the recently released
12367 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
12368 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
12369
12370 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12371
12372 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
12373 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
12374 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
12375 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
12376 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
12377 information technology and science/technology.</p>
12378
12379 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12380 project?</strong></p>
12381
12382 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
12383 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
12384 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
12385 contributing.</p>
12386
12387 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12388 Edu?</strong></p>
12389
12390 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
12391 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
12392 Debian Project!</p>
12393
12394 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12395 Edu?</strong></p>
12396
12397 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
12398 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
12399 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
12400 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
12401 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
12402 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
12403 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
12404
12405 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
12406 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
12407
12408 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12409
12410 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
12411 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
12412 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
12413 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
12414
12415 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12416 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12417
12418 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
12419 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
12420 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
12421 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
12422 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
12423 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
12424 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
12425
12426 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
12427 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
12428 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
12429 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
12430 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
12431 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
12432 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
12433 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
12434
12435       </div>
12436       <div class="tags">
12437
12438
12439         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12440
12441
12442       </div>
12443     </div>
12444     <div class="padding"></div>
12445
12446     <div class="entry">
12447       <div class="title">
12448         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
12449       </div>
12450       <div class="date">
12451          8th April 2012
12452       </div>
12453       <div class="body">
12454         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
12455 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
12456 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
12457 contributor to the
12458 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
12459 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
12460
12461 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12462
12463 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
12464 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
12465
12466 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12467 project?</strong></p>
12468
12469 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
12470 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
12471 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
12472 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
12473 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
12474 "localisation".</p>
12475
12476 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12477 Edu?</strong></p>
12478
12479 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12480 Edu?</strong></p>
12481
12482 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
12483 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
12484 education system.</p>
12485
12486 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
12487 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
12488 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
12489 money on the latest hardware.</p>
12490
12491 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12492
12493 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
12494 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
12495 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
12496
12497 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12498 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12499
12500 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
12501 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
12502 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
12503
12504       </div>
12505       <div class="tags">
12506
12507
12508         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12509
12510
12511       </div>
12512     </div>
12513     <div class="padding"></div>
12514
12515     <div class="entry">
12516       <div class="title">
12517         <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>
12518       </div>
12519       <div class="date">
12520          6th April 2012
12521       </div>
12522       <div class="body">
12523         <p>Recently I have spent time with
12524 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
12525 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
12526 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
12527 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
12528 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
12529 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
12530 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
12531 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
12532
12533 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
12534 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
12535 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
12536 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
12537 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
12538 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
12539 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
12540 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
12541
12542 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
12543 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
12544 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
12545 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
12546 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
12547 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
12548 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
12549 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
12550
12551 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
12552 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
12553 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
12554 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
12555 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
12556 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
12557 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
12558 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
12559 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
12560 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
12561
12562 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
12563 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
12564 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
12565 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
12566
12567 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
12568 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
12569
12570       </div>
12571       <div class="tags">
12572
12573
12574         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12575
12576
12577       </div>
12578     </div>
12579     <div class="padding"></div>
12580
12581     <div class="entry">
12582       <div class="title">
12583         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
12584       </div>
12585       <div class="date">
12586          5th April 2012
12587       </div>
12588       <div class="body">
12589         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
12590 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
12591 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
12592 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
12593 for schools.  Check out his article
12594 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
12595 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
12596
12597       </div>
12598       <div class="tags">
12599
12600
12601         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12602
12603
12604       </div>
12605     </div>
12606     <div class="padding"></div>
12607
12608     <div class="entry">
12609       <div class="title">
12610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
12611       </div>
12612       <div class="date">
12613          1st April 2012
12614       </div>
12615       <div class="body">
12616         <p>Germany is a core area for the
12617 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12618 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
12619 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
12620
12621 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12622
12623 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
12624 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
12625 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
12626 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
12627 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
12628 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
12629 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
12630 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
12631
12632 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
12633 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
12634 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
12635 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
12636 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
12637 the end of April this year.</p>
12638
12639 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12640 project?</strong></p>
12641
12642 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
12643 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
12644 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
12645 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
12646 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
12647 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
12648 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
12649 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
12650 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
12651 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
12652 Skolelinux.</p>
12653
12654 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
12655 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
12656 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
12657 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
12658 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
12659 the admin teachers.</p>
12660
12661 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12662 Edu?</strong></p>
12663
12664 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
12665 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
12666 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
12667
12668 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
12669 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
12670 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
12671 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
12672 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
12673
12674 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12675 Edu?</strong></p>
12676
12677 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
12678
12679 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12680
12681 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
12682 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
12683 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
12684 LibreOffice.</p>
12685
12686 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12687 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12688
12689 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
12690 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
12691 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
12692
12693       </div>
12694       <div class="tags">
12695
12696
12697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12698
12699
12700       </div>
12701     </div>
12702     <div class="padding"></div>
12703
12704     <div class="entry">
12705       <div class="title">
12706         <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>
12707       </div>
12708       <div class="date">
12709         25th March 2012
12710       </div>
12711       <div class="body">
12712         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
12713
12714 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
12715 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
12716 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
12717 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
12718 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
12719 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
12720 and download as a
12721 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
12722 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
12723
12724 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
12725   <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"' />
12726     <p>Download video as
12727       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
12728 </video></p>
12729
12730       </div>
12731       <div class="tags">
12732
12733
12734         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12735
12736
12737       </div>
12738     </div>
12739     <div class="padding"></div>
12740
12741     <div class="entry">
12742       <div class="title">
12743         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
12744       </div>
12745       <div class="date">
12746         19th March 2012
12747       </div>
12748       <div class="body">
12749         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
12750 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
12751 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
12752 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
12753 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
12754
12755 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12756
12757 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
12758 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
12759 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
12760 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
12761 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
12762 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
12763 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
12764 installations.</p>
12765
12766 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12767 project?</strong></p>
12768
12769 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
12770 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
12771 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
12772 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
12773 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
12774 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
12775 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
12776 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
12777 these things we decided to try it.</p>
12778
12779 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12780 Edu?</strong></p>
12781
12782 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
12783 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
12784 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
12785 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
12786 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
12787 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
12788 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
12789 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
12790
12791 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12792 Edu?</strong></p>
12793
12794 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
12795 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
12796 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
12797 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
12798 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
12799
12800 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12801
12802 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
12803 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
12804 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
12805 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
12806 that counts...)</p>
12807
12808 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12809 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12810
12811 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
12812 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
12813 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
12814 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
12815 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
12816 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
12817 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
12818 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
12819 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
12820 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
12821 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
12822
12823 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
12824 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
12825 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
12826
12827       </div>
12828       <div class="tags">
12829
12830
12831         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12832
12833
12834       </div>
12835     </div>
12836     <div class="padding"></div>
12837
12838     <div class="entry">
12839       <div class="title">
12840         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
12841       </div>
12842       <div class="date">
12843         16th March 2012
12844       </div>
12845       <div class="body">
12846         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
12847 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
12848 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
12849 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
12850
12851 <ol>
12852
12853 <li>The documentation is written in a
12854 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
12855 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
12856 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
12857 docbook XML.</li>
12858
12859 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
12860 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
12861 with the translated text.</li>
12862
12863 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
12864 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
12865 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
12866 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
12867 images.</li>
12868
12869 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
12870 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
12871
12872 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
12873 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
12874
12875 </ol>
12876
12877 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
12878 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
12879 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
12880 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
12881 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
12882
12883 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
12884 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
12885 package</a>.</p>
12886
12887       </div>
12888       <div class="tags">
12889
12890
12891         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12892
12893
12894       </div>
12895     </div>
12896     <div class="padding"></div>
12897
12898     <div class="entry">
12899       <div class="title">
12900         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
12901       </div>
12902       <div class="date">
12903         11th March 2012
12904       </div>
12905       <div class="body">
12906         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
12907 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
12908 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
12909 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
12910 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
12911 you have not done so already.</p>
12912
12913 <p>I plan to present the new version at
12914 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
12915 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
12916 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
12917
12918       </div>
12919       <div class="tags">
12920
12921
12922         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12923
12924
12925       </div>
12926     </div>
12927     <div class="padding"></div>
12928
12929     <div class="entry">
12930       <div class="title">
12931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
12932       </div>
12933       <div class="date">
12934          9th March 2012
12935       </div>
12936       <div class="body">
12937         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
12938 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
12939 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12940 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
12941 more international audience.</p>
12942
12943 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
12944 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
12945 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
12946 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
12947 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
12948 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
12949 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
12950
12951
12952 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12953
12954 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
12955 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
12956 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
12957 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
12958 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
12959 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
12960 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
12961 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
12962 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
12963 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
12964 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
12965
12966 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12967 project?</strong></p>
12968
12969 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
12970 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
12971 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
12972 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
12973 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
12974 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
12975 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
12976 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
12977 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
12978 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
12979 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
12980 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
12981 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
12982
12983 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12984 Edu?</strong></p>
12985
12986 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
12987 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
12988 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
12989 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
12990 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
12991 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
12992 Japan.</p>
12993
12994 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12995 Edu?</strong></p>
12996
12997 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
12998 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
12999 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
13000 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
13001 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
13002 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
13003 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
13004 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
13005 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
13006 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
13007 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
13008 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
13009 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
13010 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
13011 help.</p>
13012
13013 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13014
13015 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
13016 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
13017 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
13018 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
13019 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
13020 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
13021 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
13022 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
13023 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
13024 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
13025 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
13026
13027 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13028 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13029
13030 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
13031 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
13032 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
13033 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
13034 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
13035 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
13036 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
13037 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
13038 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
13039 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
13040 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
13041 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
13042
13043       </div>
13044       <div class="tags">
13045
13046
13047         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13048
13049
13050       </div>
13051     </div>
13052     <div class="padding"></div>
13053
13054     <div class="entry">
13055       <div class="title">
13056         <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>
13057       </div>
13058       <div class="date">
13059          7th March 2012
13060       </div>
13061       <div class="body">
13062         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
13063
13064 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
13065 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
13066 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
13067 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
13068 download as a
13069 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
13070 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
13071
13072 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
13073   <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"' />
13074     <p>Download video as
13075       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
13076 </video></p>
13077
13078       </div>
13079       <div class="tags">
13080
13081
13082         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13083
13084
13085       </div>
13086     </div>
13087     <div class="padding"></div>
13088
13089     <div class="entry">
13090       <div class="title">
13091         <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>
13092       </div>
13093       <div class="date">
13094          4th March 2012
13095       </div>
13096       <div class="body">
13097         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
13098 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13099 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13100 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
13101 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
13102 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13103
13104       </div>
13105       <div class="tags">
13106
13107
13108         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13109
13110
13111       </div>
13112     </div>
13113     <div class="padding"></div>
13114
13115     <div class="entry">
13116       <div class="title">
13117         <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>
13118       </div>
13119       <div class="date">
13120          3rd March 2012
13121       </div>
13122       <div class="body">
13123         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
13124 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
13125 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
13126 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
13127 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
13128 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
13129 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
13130 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
13131 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
13132 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
13133 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
13134 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
13135 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
13136 year...</p>
13137
13138 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
13139 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
13140 name,
13141 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
13142 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
13143 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
13144 mean). I've been following
13145 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
13146 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
13147 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
13148 Check it out. :)</p>
13149
13150       </div>
13151       <div class="tags">
13152
13153
13154         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13155
13156
13157       </div>
13158     </div>
13159     <div class="padding"></div>
13160
13161     <div class="entry">
13162       <div class="title">
13163         <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>
13164       </div>
13165       <div class="date">
13166         27th February 2012
13167       </div>
13168       <div class="body">
13169         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
13170 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13171 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
13172 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
13173 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
13174 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
13175 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13176
13177       </div>
13178       <div class="tags">
13179
13180
13181         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13182
13183
13184       </div>
13185     </div>
13186     <div class="padding"></div>
13187
13188     <div class="entry">
13189       <div class="title">
13190         <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>
13191       </div>
13192       <div class="date">
13193         19th February 2012
13194       </div>
13195       <div class="body">
13196         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
13197 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
13198 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13199 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13200 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
13201 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
13202 solution for your school.</p>
13203
13204       </div>
13205       <div class="tags">
13206
13207
13208         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13209
13210
13211       </div>
13212     </div>
13213     <div class="padding"></div>
13214
13215     <div class="entry">
13216       <div class="title">
13217         <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>
13218       </div>
13219       <div class="date">
13220         14th February 2012
13221       </div>
13222       <div class="body">
13223         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
13224 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
13225 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
13226 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
13227 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
13228 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
13229 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
13230 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
13231 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
13232
13233 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
13234 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
13235 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
13236 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
13237 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
13238
13239 <blockquote><pre>
13240 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
13241 do
13242     printf "Failed disk $d: "
13243     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
13244 done
13245 </blockquote></pre>
13246
13247 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
13248 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
13249
13250 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
13251
13252 <blockquote><pre>
13253 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
13254 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
13255 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
13256 </blockquote></pre>
13257
13258 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
13259 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
13260 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
13261 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
13262 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
13263 mounted inside my box.</p>
13264
13265 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
13266 Software RAID in the
13267 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
13268 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
13269 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
13270 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
13271 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
13272 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
13273
13274       </div>
13275       <div class="tags">
13276
13277
13278         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>.
13279
13280
13281       </div>
13282     </div>
13283     <div class="padding"></div>
13284
13285     <div class="entry">
13286       <div class="title">
13287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13288       </div>
13289       <div class="date">
13290         13th February 2012
13291       </div>
13292       <div class="body">
13293         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
13294 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
13295 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
13296 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
13297 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
13298 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
13299 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
13300 change the global proxy setting by editing
13301 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
13302 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
13303
13304 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
13305 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
13306 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
13307
13308 <blockquote><pre>
13309 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
13310 {
13311    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
13312        isPlainHostName(host) ||
13313        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
13314       return "DIRECT";
13315    else
13316       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
13317 }
13318 </pre></blockquote>
13319
13320 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
13321
13322 <blockquote><pre>
13323 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
13324 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
13325 </pre></blockquote>
13326
13327 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
13328 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
13329 would be used for
13330 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
13331 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
13332 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
13333 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
13334 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
13335 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
13336 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
13337 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
13338 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
13339 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
13340
13341 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
13342 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
13343 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
13344 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
13345 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
13346 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
13347
13348 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
13349 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
13350 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
13351 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
13352 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
13353 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
13354 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
13355 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
13356 the network setup changes.</p>
13357
13358 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
13359 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
13360 draft</a> and a
13361 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
13362 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
13363
13364       </div>
13365       <div class="tags">
13366
13367
13368         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13369
13370
13371       </div>
13372     </div>
13373     <div class="padding"></div>
13374
13375     <div class="entry">
13376       <div class="title">
13377         <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>
13378       </div>
13379       <div class="date">
13380          5th February 2012
13381       </div>
13382       <div class="body">
13383         <p>Since the Lenny version of
13384 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
13385 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
13386 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
13387 in the morning.  This is done using the
13388 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
13389
13390 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
13391 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
13392 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
13393 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
13394 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
13395 the
13396 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
13397 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
13398 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
13399 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
13400 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
13401
13402 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
13403 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
13404 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
13405 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
13406 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
13407 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
13408 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
13409
13410 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
13411 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
13412 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
13413 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
13414 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
13415
13416       </div>
13417       <div class="tags">
13418
13419
13420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13421
13422
13423       </div>
13424     </div>
13425     <div class="padding"></div>
13426
13427     <div class="entry">
13428       <div class="title">
13429         <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>
13430       </div>
13431       <div class="date">
13432          4th February 2012
13433       </div>
13434       <div class="body">
13435         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
13436 publish the third beta version of
13437 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13438 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
13439 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
13440 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
13441 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
13442 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
13443 on the project announcement list.</p>
13444
13445 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
13446 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
13447
13448 <ul>
13449
13450 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
13451   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
13452   the installation.</li>
13453
13454 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
13455   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
13456
13457 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
13458   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
13459   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
13460
13461 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
13462   for the local system administrator is created during installation
13463   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
13464   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
13465   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
13466   up to date on the system.</li>
13467
13468 </ul>
13469
13470 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
13471 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
13472 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
13473 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
13474
13475 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
13476 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
13477 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
13478 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
13479 will see you there?</p>
13480
13481       </div>
13482       <div class="tags">
13483
13484
13485         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13486
13487
13488       </div>
13489     </div>
13490     <div class="padding"></div>
13491
13492     <div class="entry">
13493       <div class="title">
13494         <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>
13495       </div>
13496       <div class="date">
13497         27th January 2012
13498       </div>
13499       <div class="body">
13500         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
13501 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
13502 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13503 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
13504 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
13505 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
13506 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
13507
13508 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
13509 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
13510 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
13511 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
13512 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
13513 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
13514 not taken care of by this.</p>
13515
13516 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
13517 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
13518 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
13519 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
13520 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
13521 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
13522 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
13523 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
13524 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
13525 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
13526 firmware packages.</p>
13527
13528 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
13529 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
13530 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
13531 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
13532 initrd with extra firmware, the
13533 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
13534 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
13535 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
13536
13537 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
13538 network cards working.  For this,
13539 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
13540 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
13541 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
13542
13543 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
13544 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
13545 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
13546
13547 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
13548 try.</p>
13549
13550       </div>
13551       <div class="tags">
13552
13553
13554         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13555
13556
13557       </div>
13558     </div>
13559     <div class="padding"></div>
13560
13561     <div class="entry">
13562       <div class="title">
13563         <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>
13564       </div>
13565       <div class="date">
13566         25th January 2012
13567       </div>
13568       <div class="body">
13569         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
13570 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
13571 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
13572 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
13573 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
13574
13575 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
13576 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
13577 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
13578 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
13579 this is done, log on to the central server and run
13580 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
13581 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
13582 will look similar to this:</p>
13583
13584 <p><blockquote><pre>
13585 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
13586 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
13587 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.
13588
13589 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
13590
13591 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13592 enter password: *******
13593 %
13594 </pre></blockquote></p>
13595
13596 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
13597 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
13598 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
13599 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
13600 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
13601 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
13602 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
13603 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
13604 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
13605 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
13606 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
13607 automatically.</p>
13608
13609 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
13610 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
13611
13612 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
13613 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
13614 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
13615
13616       </div>
13617       <div class="tags">
13618
13619
13620         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13621
13622
13623       </div>
13624     </div>
13625     <div class="padding"></div>
13626
13627     <div class="entry">
13628       <div class="title">
13629         <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>
13630       </div>
13631       <div class="date">
13632         10th January 2012
13633       </div>
13634       <div class="body">
13635         <p>In the Squeeze version of
13636 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
13637 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
13638 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
13639 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
13640 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
13641 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
13642 first time.</p>
13643
13644 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
13645 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
13646 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
13647 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
13648
13649 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
13650 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
13651 new setting.</p>
13652
13653 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
13654 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
13655 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
13656
13657       </div>
13658       <div class="tags">
13659
13660
13661         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13662
13663
13664       </div>
13665     </div>
13666     <div class="padding"></div>
13667
13668     <div class="entry">
13669       <div class="title">
13670         <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>
13671       </div>
13672       <div class="date">
13673          7th January 2012
13674       </div>
13675       <div class="body">
13676         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
13677 the second beta version of
13678 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
13679 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
13680 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
13681 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
13682 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
13683 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
13684 on the project announcement list.</p>
13685
13686       </div>
13687       <div class="tags">
13688
13689
13690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13691
13692
13693       </div>
13694     </div>
13695     <div class="padding"></div>
13696
13697     <div class="entry">
13698       <div class="title">
13699         <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>
13700       </div>
13701       <div class="date">
13702          3rd January 2012
13703       </div>
13704       <div class="body">
13705         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
13706 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
13707 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
13708 interesting.</p>
13709
13710 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
13711 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
13712 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
13713 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
13714 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
13715 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
13716 wrap up its tasks.</p>
13717
13718 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
13719 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
13720 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
13721 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
13722 because I was typing.</P>
13723
13724 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
13725 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
13726 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
13727 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
13728 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
13729 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
13730 generate entropy.</p>
13731
13732 <p>The fix is in
13733 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
13734 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
13735 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
13736 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
13737
13738       </div>
13739       <div class="tags">
13740
13741
13742         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13743
13744
13745       </div>
13746     </div>
13747     <div class="padding"></div>
13748
13749     <div class="entry">
13750       <div class="title">
13751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
13752       </div>
13753       <div class="date">
13754         21st November 2011
13755       </div>
13756       <div class="body">
13757         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
13758 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
13759 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
13760 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
13761 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
13762 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
13763 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
13764 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
13765 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
13766 the tools to do so.</p>
13767
13768 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
13769 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
13770 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
13771 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
13772
13773 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
13774 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
13775 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
13776 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
13777 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
13778 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
13779 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
13780 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
13781
13782 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
13783 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
13784 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
13785
13786 <p><pre>
13787 #!/usr/bin/perl
13788 use strict;
13789 use warnings;
13790 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
13791 BEGIN {
13792     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
13793     my %rhelmodules = (
13794         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
13795         );
13796     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
13797         eval "use $module;";
13798         if ($@) {
13799             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
13800             system("yum install -y $pkg");
13801             eval "use $module;";
13802         }
13803     }
13804 }
13805 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
13806
13807 upgrade_dell();
13808
13809 exit 0;
13810
13811 sub run_firmware_script {
13812     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
13813     unless ($script) {
13814         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
13815         exit 1
13816     }
13817     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
13818
13819     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
13820         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
13821     } else {
13822         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
13823     }
13824 }
13825
13826 sub run_firmware_scripts {
13827     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
13828     # Run firmware packages
13829     for my $dir (@dirs) {
13830         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
13831         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
13832         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
13833             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
13834             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
13835         }
13836         closedir $dh;
13837     }
13838 }
13839
13840 sub download {
13841     my $url = shift;
13842     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
13843     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
13844 }
13845
13846 sub upgrade_dell {
13847     my @dirs;
13848     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
13849     chomp $product;
13850
13851     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
13852
13853         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
13854         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
13855
13856         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
13857             CLEANUP => 1
13858             );
13859         chdir($tmpdir);
13860         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
13861         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
13862         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
13863         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
13864         my $fwopts = "-q";
13865         if (@paths) {
13866             for my $url (@paths) {
13867                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
13868             }
13869             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
13870         } else {
13871             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
13872             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
13873         }
13874         chdir('/');
13875     } else {
13876         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
13877         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
13878     }
13879 }
13880
13881 sub fetch_dell_fw {
13882     my $path = shift;
13883     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
13884     download($url);
13885 }
13886
13887 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
13888 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
13889 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
13890 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
13891     my $filename = shift;
13892
13893     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
13894     chomp $product;
13895     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
13896
13897     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
13898
13899     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
13900     my @paths;
13901     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
13902         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
13903         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
13904         my $oscode;
13905         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
13906             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
13907         } else {
13908             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
13909         }
13910         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
13911         {
13912             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
13913         }
13914     }
13915     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
13916         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
13917
13918         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
13919         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
13920
13921         my $cpath = $component->{path};
13922         for my $path (@paths) {
13923             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
13924                 push(@paths, $cpath);
13925             }
13926         }
13927     }
13928     return @paths;
13929 }
13930 </pre>
13931
13932 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
13933 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
13934 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
13935 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
13936 outdated.</p>
13937
13938       </div>
13939       <div class="tags">
13940
13941
13942         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13943
13944
13945       </div>
13946     </div>
13947     <div class="padding"></div>
13948
13949     <div class="entry">
13950       <div class="title">
13951         <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>
13952       </div>
13953       <div class="date">
13954          7th October 2011
13955       </div>
13956       <div class="body">
13957         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
13958 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
13959 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
13960 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
13961 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
13962 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
13963 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
13964 models.</p>
13965
13966 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
13967 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
13968 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
13969 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
13970
13971 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
13972 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
13973 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
13974 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
13975 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
13976 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
13977 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
13978 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
13979 distributed.</p>
13980
13981 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
13982
13983 <ul>
13984
13985 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
13986   other relevant equipment.</li>
13987
13988 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
13989
13990 </ul>
13991
13992 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
13993 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
13994 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
13995 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
13996 books available.</p>
13997
13998 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
13999 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
14000 libraries. :)</p>
14001
14002       </div>
14003       <div class="tags">
14004
14005
14006         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>.
14007
14008
14009       </div>
14010     </div>
14011     <div class="padding"></div>
14012
14013     <div class="entry">
14014       <div class="title">
14015         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
14016       </div>
14017       <div class="date">
14018         17th September 2011
14019       </div>
14020       <div class="body">
14021         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
14022 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
14023 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
14024 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
14025 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
14026 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
14027 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
14028 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
14029
14030 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
14031
14032 <blockquote><pre>
14033 #!/bin/sh
14034 # apt-get install lsdvd
14035 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14036 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
14037 </pre></blockquote>
14038
14039 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
14040 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
14041 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
14042 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
14043
14044 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
14045 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
14046 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
14047 back as an ISO.
14048
14049 <blockquote><pre>
14050 #!/bin/sh
14051 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
14052 set -e
14053 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
14054 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14055 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
14056 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
14057 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
14058 </pre></blockquote>
14059
14060 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
14061
14062 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
14063 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
14064 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
14065 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
14066 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
14067
14068 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
14069 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
14070 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
14071 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
14072 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
14073 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
14074
14075       </div>
14076       <div class="tags">
14077
14078
14079         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>.
14080
14081
14082       </div>
14083     </div>
14084     <div class="padding"></div>
14085
14086     <div class="entry">
14087       <div class="title">
14088         <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>
14089       </div>
14090       <div class="date">
14091          4th August 2011
14092       </div>
14093       <div class="body">
14094         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
14095 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
14096 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
14097 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
14098 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
14099 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
14100 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
14101 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
14102 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
14103
14104 <p><blockquote>
14105 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
14106 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
14107 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
14108 </blockquote></p>
14109
14110 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
14111 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
14112 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
14113 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
14114 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
14115 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
14116 hard to explain.</p>
14117
14118 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
14119 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
14120 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
14121 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
14122 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
14123 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
14124 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
14125 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
14126 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
14127 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
14128 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
14129 mode).</p>
14130
14131 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
14132 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
14133 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
14134 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
14135 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
14136 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
14137 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
14138 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
14139 after visiting single user mode.</p>
14140
14141 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
14142 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
14143 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
14144 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
14145 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
14146 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
14147 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
14148 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
14149
14150 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
14151 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
14152 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
14153
14154       </div>
14155       <div class="tags">
14156
14157
14158         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>.
14159
14160
14161       </div>
14162     </div>
14163     <div class="padding"></div>
14164
14165     <div class="entry">
14166       <div class="title">
14167         <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>
14168       </div>
14169       <div class="date">
14170         30th July 2011
14171       </div>
14172       <div class="body">
14173         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
14174 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
14175 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
14176 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
14177 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
14178 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
14179 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
14180 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
14181 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
14182 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
14183 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
14184 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
14185 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
14186
14187 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
14188 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
14189 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
14190 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
14191 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
14192 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
14193 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
14194 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
14195 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
14196
14197 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
14198 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
14199 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
14200 is presented.</p>
14201
14202 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
14203 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
14204 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
14205 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
14206 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
14207 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
14208 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
14209 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
14210 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
14211 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
14212 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
14213 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
14214 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
14215 find time to push this forward.</p>
14216
14217       </div>
14218       <div class="tags">
14219
14220
14221         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>.
14222
14223
14224       </div>
14225     </div>
14226     <div class="padding"></div>
14227
14228     <div class="entry">
14229       <div class="title">
14230         <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>
14231       </div>
14232       <div class="date">
14233         29th July 2011
14234       </div>
14235       <div class="body">
14236         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
14237 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
14238 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
14239 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
14240 issues.</p>
14241
14242 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
14243 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
14244 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
14245
14246 <ol>
14247
14248 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
14249 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
14250 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
14251 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
14252 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
14253 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
14254 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
14255 Debian.</li>
14256
14257 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
14258 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
14259 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
14260 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
14261 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
14262 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
14263 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
14264 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
14265 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
14266 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
14267 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
14268 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
14269 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
14270
14271 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
14272 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
14273 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
14274 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
14275 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
14276 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
14277 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
14278 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
14279 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
14280 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
14281
14282 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
14283 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
14284 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
14285 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
14286 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
14287 latter behaviour.</li>
14288
14289 </ol>
14290
14291 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
14292 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
14293 it do not matter much.</p>
14294
14295 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
14296 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
14297 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
14298
14299       </div>
14300       <div class="tags">
14301
14302
14303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14304
14305
14306       </div>
14307     </div>
14308     <div class="padding"></div>
14309
14310     <div class="entry">
14311       <div class="title">
14312         <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>
14313       </div>
14314       <div class="date">
14315         26th July 2011
14316       </div>
14317       <div class="body">
14318         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
14319 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
14320 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
14321 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
14322 security support for a few years.</p>
14323
14324 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
14325 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
14326 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
14327 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
14328 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
14329 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
14330 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
14331 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
14332 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
14333 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
14334 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
14335 easier in the future.</p>
14336
14337 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
14338 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
14339 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
14340 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
14341 do not have time for.</p>
14342
14343       </div>
14344       <div class="tags">
14345
14346
14347         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
14348
14349
14350       </div>
14351     </div>
14352     <div class="padding"></div>
14353
14354     <div class="entry">
14355       <div class="title">
14356         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
14357       </div>
14358       <div class="date">
14359         20th June 2011
14360       </div>
14361       <div class="body">
14362         <p>Reading
14363 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
14364 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
14365 parts of the
14366 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
14367 and
14368 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
14369 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
14370 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
14371 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
14372
14373       </div>
14374       <div class="tags">
14375
14376
14377         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>.
14378
14379
14380       </div>
14381     </div>
14382     <div class="padding"></div>
14383
14384     <div class="entry">
14385       <div class="title">
14386         <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>
14387       </div>
14388       <div class="date">
14389         30th April 2011
14390       </div>
14391       <div class="body">
14392         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
14393 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
14394 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
14395 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
14396 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
14397 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
14398 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
14399 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
14400 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
14401 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
14402
14403 <p>Where is it?  Visit
14404 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
14405 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
14406 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
14407 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
14408
14409       </div>
14410       <div class="tags">
14411
14412
14413         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>.
14414
14415
14416       </div>
14417     </div>
14418     <div class="padding"></div>
14419
14420     <div class="entry">
14421       <div class="title">
14422         <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>
14423       </div>
14424       <div class="date">
14425         29th April 2011
14426       </div>
14427       <div class="body">
14428         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
14429 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
14430 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
14431 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
14432 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
14433 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
14434 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
14435 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
14436 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
14437 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
14438 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
14439 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
14440 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
14441
14442 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
14443 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
14444 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
14445 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
14446 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
14447 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
14448 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
14449 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
14450 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
14451 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
14452 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
14453 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
14454 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
14455
14456 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
14457 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
14458 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
14459 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
14460 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
14461 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
14462 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
14463 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
14464 it.</p>
14465
14466 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
14467 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
14468 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
14469 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
14470 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
14471 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
14472 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
14473
14474 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
14475 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
14476 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
14477 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
14478 and range= options.</p>
14479
14480 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
14481 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
14482 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
14483 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
14484 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
14485 to best handle this.  I've noticed
14486 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
14487 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
14488 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
14489 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
14490
14491 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
14492 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
14493 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
14494 discussions instead of only
14495 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
14496 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
14497 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
14498 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
14499 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
14500 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
14501
14502       </div>
14503       <div class="tags">
14504
14505
14506         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>.
14507
14508
14509       </div>
14510     </div>
14511     <div class="padding"></div>
14512
14513     <div class="entry">
14514       <div class="title">
14515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
14516       </div>
14517       <div class="date">
14518          6th April 2011
14519       </div>
14520       <div class="body">
14521         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
14522 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
14523 A few days ago the project
14524 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
14525 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
14526 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
14527 into Gnash.</p>
14528
14529       </div>
14530       <div class="tags">
14531
14532
14533         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>.
14534
14535
14536       </div>
14537     </div>
14538     <div class="padding"></div>
14539
14540     <div class="entry">
14541       <div class="title">
14542         <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>
14543       </div>
14544       <div class="date">
14545          3rd April 2011
14546       </div>
14547       <div class="body">
14548         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
14549 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
14550 update in English.</p>
14551
14552 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
14553 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
14554 of the British service
14555 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
14556 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
14557 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
14558 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
14559 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
14560 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
14561 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
14562 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
14563 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
14564 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
14565 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
14566 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
14567 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
14568
14569 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
14570 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
14571 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
14572 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
14573 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
14574 public infrastructure.</p>
14575
14576 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
14577 such service?</p>
14578
14579       </div>
14580       <div class="tags">
14581
14582
14583         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
14584
14585
14586       </div>
14587     </div>
14588     <div class="padding"></div>
14589
14590     <div class="entry">
14591       <div class="title">
14592         <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>
14593       </div>
14594       <div class="date">
14595         28th January 2011
14596       </div>
14597       <div class="body">
14598         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
14599 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
14600 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
14601 available on the Internet, and check our locally
14602 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
14603 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
14604 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
14605 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
14606 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
14607 out which security holes were present in our free software
14608 collection.</p>
14609
14610 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
14611 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
14612 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
14613 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
14614 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
14615 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
14616 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
14617 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
14618 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
14619 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
14620 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
14621 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
14622 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
14623 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
14624 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
14625 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
14626
14627 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
14628 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
14629 check out, one could look up
14630 <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
14631 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
14632 The most recent one is
14633 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
14634 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
14635 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
14636
14637 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
14638 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
14639 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
14640 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
14641 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
14642 security issues out.</p>
14643
14644 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
14645 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
14646 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
14647 RHEL is providing
14648 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
14649 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
14650 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
14651
14652 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
14653 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
14654 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
14655 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
14656 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
14657 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
14658 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
14659 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
14660 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
14661 established soon.</p>
14662
14663 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
14664 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
14665 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
14666 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
14667 for their packages.</p>
14668
14669       </div>
14670       <div class="tags">
14671
14672
14673         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
14674
14675
14676       </div>
14677     </div>
14678     <div class="padding"></div>
14679
14680     <div class="entry">
14681       <div class="title">
14682         <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>
14683       </div>
14684       <div class="date">
14685         23rd January 2011
14686       </div>
14687       <div class="body">
14688         <p>In the
14689 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
14690 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
14691 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
14692 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
14693 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
14694 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
14695 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
14696 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
14697 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
14698 one of my machines like this:</p>
14699
14700 <pre>
14701 loaded modules:
14702 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
14703 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
14704 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
14705 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
14706 10de:03ec pata_amd
14707 10de:03f6 sata_nv
14708 1022:1103 k8temp
14709 109e:036e bttv
14710 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
14711 11ab:4364 sky2
14712 </pre>
14713
14714 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
14715 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
14716
14717 <pre>
14718 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
14719     echo loaded pci modules:
14720     (
14721         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
14722         for address in * ; do
14723             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
14724                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
14725                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
14726                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
14727                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
14728                     echo "$id $module"
14729                 fi
14730             fi
14731         done
14732     )
14733     echo
14734 fi
14735 </pre>
14736
14737 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
14738 mappings:</p>
14739
14740 <pre>
14741 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
14742     echo loaded usb modules:
14743     (
14744         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
14745         for address in * ; do
14746             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
14747                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
14748                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
14749                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
14750                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
14751                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
14752                         echo "$id $module"
14753                     fi
14754                 fi
14755             fi
14756         done
14757     )
14758     echo
14759 fi
14760 </pre>
14761
14762 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
14763 well.</p>
14764
14765       </div>
14766       <div class="tags">
14767
14768
14769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14770
14771
14772       </div>
14773     </div>
14774     <div class="padding"></div>
14775
14776     <div class="entry">
14777       <div class="title">
14778         <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>
14779       </div>
14780       <div class="date">
14781         16th January 2011
14782       </div>
14783       <div class="body">
14784         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
14785 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
14786 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
14787 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
14788 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
14789 the Wikipedia article on
14790 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
14791 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
14792 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
14793 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
14794 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
14795 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
14796 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
14797 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
14798 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
14799 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
14800 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
14801 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
14802
14803 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
14804 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
14805 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
14806 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
14807 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
14808 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
14809 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
14810 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
14811 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
14812 from last week</a>.</p>
14813
14814 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
14815 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
14816 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
14817 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
14818 was without royalties and license terms, check out
14819 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
14820 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
14821
14822 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
14823 available from
14824 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
14825 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
14826 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
14827
14828 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
14829 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
14830 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
14831 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
14832
14833       </div>
14834       <div class="tags">
14835
14836
14837         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
14838
14839
14840       </div>
14841     </div>
14842     <div class="padding"></div>
14843
14844     <div class="entry">
14845       <div class="title">
14846         <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>
14847       </div>
14848       <div class="date">
14849         12th January 2011
14850       </div>
14851       <div class="body">
14852         <p>Today I discovered
14853 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
14854 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
14855 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
14856 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
14857 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
14858 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
14859 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
14860 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
14861 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
14862 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
14863 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
14864 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
14865 on the Google announcement is available from
14866 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
14867 A good read. :)</p>
14868
14869 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
14870 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
14871 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
14872 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
14873 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
14874 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
14875 browsers support H.264, and others support
14876 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
14877 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
14878 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
14879 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
14880 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
14881 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
14882 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
14883 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
14884
14885 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
14886 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
14887 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
14888 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
14889 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
14890 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
14891 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
14892
14893 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
14894 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
14895 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
14896 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
14897 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
14898 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
14899 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
14900
14901 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
14902 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
14903 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
14904 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
14905 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
14906 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
14907 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
14908
14909 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
14910 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
14911 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
14912 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
14913 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
14914 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
14915 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
14916 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
14917 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
14918 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
14919 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
14920 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
14921 I guess time will tell.</p>
14922
14923 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
14924 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
14925 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
14926
14927       </div>
14928       <div class="tags">
14929
14930
14931         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
14932
14933
14934       </div>
14935     </div>
14936     <div class="padding"></div>
14937
14938     <div class="entry">
14939       <div class="title">
14940         <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>
14941       </div>
14942       <div class="date">
14943         30th December 2010
14944       </div>
14945       <div class="body">
14946         <p>After trying to
14947 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
14948 Ogg Theora</a> to
14949 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
14950 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
14951 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
14952 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
14953 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
14954 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
14955 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
14956
14957 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
14958 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
14959 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
14960 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
14961 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
14962 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
14963 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
14964
14965 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
14966 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
14967
14968       </div>
14969       <div class="tags">
14970
14971
14972         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>.
14973
14974
14975       </div>
14976     </div>
14977     <div class="padding"></div>
14978
14979     <div class="entry">
14980       <div class="title">
14981         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
14982       </div>
14983       <div class="date">
14984         27th December 2010
14985       </div>
14986       <div class="body">
14987         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
14988 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
14989 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
14990 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
14991 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
14992 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
14993 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
14994 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
14995
14996 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
14997 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
14998 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
14999 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
15000 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
15001 page</a>.</p>
15002
15003 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
15004 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
15005 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
15006 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
15007 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
15008 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
15009 specification on equal terms.</p>
15010
15011 <blockquote>
15012
15013 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
15014 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
15015 open standard:</p>
15016
15017 <ul>
15018
15019 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15020 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15021 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
15022 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
15023
15024 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15025 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
15026 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
15027 nominal fee.</li>
15028
15029 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
15030 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
15031 free basis.</li>
15032
15033 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15034
15035 </ul>
15036 </blockquote>
15037
15038 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
15039 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
15040 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
15041 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
15042 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
15043 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
15044 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
15045
15046 <blockquote>
15047
15048 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
15049
15050 <ol>
15051
15052 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
15053 tilgængelig.</li>
15054
15055 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
15056 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
15057
15058 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
15059 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
15060
15061 </ol>
15062
15063 </blockquote>
15064
15065 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
15066 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
15067
15068 <blockquote>
15069
15070 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
15071
15072 <ol>
15073
15074 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
15075 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
15076
15077 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
15078 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
15079 Standard themselves;</li>
15080
15081 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
15082 any party or in any business model;</li>
15083
15084 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
15085 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
15086 parties;</li>
15087
15088 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
15089 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
15090 parties.</li>
15091
15092 </ol>
15093
15094 </blockquote>
15095
15096 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
15097 its
15098 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
15099 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
15100
15101 <blockquote>
15102 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
15103
15104 <ul>
15105
15106 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
15107   democratic:
15108
15109          <ul>
15110
15111          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
15112             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
15113             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
15114             and managed.</li>
15115
15116          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
15117             method, can be changed through input from all
15118             participants.</li>
15119
15120          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
15121             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
15122
15123          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
15124             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
15125
15126          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
15127             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
15128             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
15129
15130          </ul>
15131
15132 </li>
15133
15134 </ul>
15135
15136 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
15137 <ul>
15138
15139 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
15140   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
15141   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
15142   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
15143   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
15144
15145 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
15146   a technical or economic barriers</li>
15147
15148 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
15149   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
15150   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
15151   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
15152   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
15153   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
15154   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
15155   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
15156   intended to function.</li>
15157
15158 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
15159   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
15160   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
15161
15162 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
15163   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
15164   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
15165   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
15166   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
15167   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
15168   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
15169   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
15170
15171       <ul>
15172
15173       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
15174         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
15175         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
15176
15177       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
15178         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
15179         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
15180         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
15181
15182       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
15183         licensor</li>
15184
15185       </ul>
15186 </li>
15187
15188 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
15189   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
15190   or restricted licensing terms</li>
15191
15192 </ul>
15193
15194 </blockquote>
15195
15196 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
15197 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
15198 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
15199 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
15200 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
15201 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
15202 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
15203 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
15204 Standards.</p>
15205
15206       </div>
15207       <div class="tags">
15208
15209
15210         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>.
15211
15212
15213       </div>
15214     </div>
15215     <div class="padding"></div>
15216
15217     <div class="entry">
15218       <div class="title">
15219         <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>
15220       </div>
15221       <div class="date">
15222         25th December 2010
15223       </div>
15224       <div class="body">
15225         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
15226 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
15227
15228 <blockquote>
15229
15230 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
15231 as follows:</p>
15232
15233 <ol>
15234
15235 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
15236 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
15237 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
15238
15239 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15240 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15241 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
15242 parties.</li>
15243
15244 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15245 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
15246 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
15247
15248 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
15249 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
15250
15251 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15252
15253 </ol>
15254
15255 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
15256 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
15257 products based on the standard.</p>
15258 </blockquote>
15259
15260 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
15261 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
15262 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
15263 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
15264 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
15265 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
15266 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
15267 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
15268
15269 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
15270
15271 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
15272 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
15273 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
15274 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
15275 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
15276 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
15277 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
15278 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
15279 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
15280 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
15281 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
15282 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
15283 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
15284 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
15285
15286 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
15287
15288 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
15289 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
15290 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
15291 documentation indicating this.</p>
15292
15293 <p>According to
15294 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
15295 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
15296 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
15297 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
15298 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
15299 report is correct.</p>
15300
15301 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
15302
15303 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
15304 container format</a> and both the
15305 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
15306 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
15307 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
15308
15309 <blockquote>
15310
15311 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
15312 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
15313 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
15314 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
15315 specification compliance.
15316
15317 </blockquote>
15318
15319 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
15320 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
15321 this is the term:<p>
15322
15323 <blockquote>
15324
15325 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
15326 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
15327 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
15328 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
15329 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
15330 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
15331 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
15332 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
15333 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
15334 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
15335 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
15336 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
15337
15338 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
15339 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
15340 </blockquote>
15341
15342 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
15343 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
15344 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
15345 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
15346 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
15347
15348 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
15349
15350 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
15351 Theora format.
15352 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
15353 and
15354 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
15355 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
15356 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
15357 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
15358 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
15359 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
15360 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
15361 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
15362
15363 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
15364
15365 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
15366
15367 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
15368
15369 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
15370 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
15371 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
15372 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
15373 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
15374 this.</p>
15375
15376 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
15377 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
15378
15379       </div>
15380       <div class="tags">
15381
15382
15383         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15384
15385
15386       </div>
15387     </div>
15388     <div class="padding"></div>
15389
15390     <div class="entry">
15391       <div class="title">
15392         <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>
15393       </div>
15394       <div class="date">
15395         25th December 2010
15396       </div>
15397       <div class="body">
15398         <p>A few days ago
15399 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
15400 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
15401 2.0 of
15402 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
15403 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
15404 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
15405 Nothing very surprising there, given
15406 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
15407 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
15408 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
15409 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
15410 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
15411 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
15412 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
15413 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
15414 standard definition from its content.</p>
15415
15416 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
15417 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
15418 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
15419 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
15420 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
15421 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
15422 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
15423 background information about that story is available in
15424 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
15425 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
15426
15427 <blockquote>
15428 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
15429 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
15430 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
15431
15432 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
15433
15434 <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>
15435
15436 <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>
15437
15438 <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>
15439
15440 <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>
15441
15442 <p>
15443 <ul>
15444 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
15445 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
15446 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
15447 </ul>
15448 </p>
15449
15450 <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>
15451
15452 <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>
15453
15454 <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>
15455
15456 <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>
15457
15458 <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>
15459
15460
15461 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
15462 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
15463 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
15464 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
15465 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
15466 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
15467
15468 </p>
15469
15470 <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>
15471
15472 <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>
15473
15474 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
15475
15476 <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>
15477
15478 <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>
15479
15480 <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>
15481
15482 <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>
15483
15484 <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>
15485
15486 <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>
15487
15488 <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>
15489
15490 <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>
15491
15492 <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>
15493
15494 <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>
15495
15496 <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>
15497
15498 <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>
15499
15500 <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>
15501
15502 <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>
15503
15504 <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>
15505
15506 <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>
15507
15508 <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>
15509
15510 <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>
15511
15512 <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>
15513
15514 <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>
15515
15516 <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>
15517
15518 <p>On security:</p>
15519
15520 <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>
15521
15522 <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>
15523
15524 <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>
15525
15526 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
15527
15528 <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>
15529
15530 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
15531
15532 <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>
15533
15534 <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>
15535
15536 <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>
15537
15538 <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>
15539
15540 <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>
15541
15542 <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>
15543
15544 <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>
15545
15546 <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>
15547
15548 <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>
15549
15550 <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>
15551
15552 <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>
15553
15554 <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>
15555
15556 <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>
15557
15558 <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>
15559
15560 <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>
15561
15562 <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>
15563
15564 <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>
15565
15566 <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>
15567
15568 <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>
15569
15570 <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>
15571
15572 <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>
15573
15574 <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>
15575
15576 <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>
15577
15578 <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>
15579
15580 <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>
15581
15582 <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>
15583
15584 <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>
15585
15586 <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>
15587
15588 <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>
15589
15590 <p>Cordially,<br>
15591 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
15592 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
15593 </blockquote>
15594
15595       </div>
15596       <div class="tags">
15597
15598
15599         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>.
15600
15601
15602       </div>
15603     </div>
15604     <div class="padding"></div>
15605
15606     <div class="entry">
15607       <div class="title">
15608         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
15609       </div>
15610       <div class="date">
15611         25th December 2010
15612       </div>
15613       <div class="body">
15614         <p>Half a year ago I
15615 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
15616 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
15617 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
15618 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
15619
15620 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
15621 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
15622 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
15623 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
15624 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
15625 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
15626 got such a great test tool available.</p>
15627
15628       </div>
15629       <div class="tags">
15630
15631
15632         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>.
15633
15634
15635       </div>
15636     </div>
15637     <div class="padding"></div>
15638
15639     <div class="entry">
15640       <div class="title">
15641         <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>
15642       </div>
15643       <div class="date">
15644         22nd December 2010
15645       </div>
15646       <div class="body">
15647         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
15648 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
15649 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
15650 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
15651 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
15652 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
15653 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
15654 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
15655 university.</p>
15656
15657 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
15658 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
15659 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
15660 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
15661 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
15662 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
15663 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
15664 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
15665
15666 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
15667 I perform on a new model.</p>
15668
15669 <ul>
15670
15671 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
15672 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
15673 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
15674
15675 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
15676 installation, X.org is working.</li>
15677
15678 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
15679 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
15680 reported by the program.</li>
15681
15682 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
15683 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
15684 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
15685 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
15686 normally test this by playing
15687 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
15688 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
15689
15690 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
15691 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
15692
15693 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
15694 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
15695
15696 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
15697 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
15698
15699 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
15700 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
15701 few.</li>
15702
15703 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
15704 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
15705 notice this.</li>
15706
15707 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
15708 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
15709 resume.</li>
15710
15711 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
15712 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
15713 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
15714 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
15715 not.</li>
15716
15717 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
15718 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
15719 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
15720 existence.</li>
15721
15722 </ul>
15723
15724 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
15725 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
15726 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
15727 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
15728 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
15729 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
15730 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
15731 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
15732
15733       </div>
15734       <div class="tags">
15735
15736
15737         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>.
15738
15739
15740       </div>
15741     </div>
15742     <div class="padding"></div>
15743
15744     <div class="entry">
15745       <div class="title">
15746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
15747       </div>
15748       <div class="date">
15749         11th December 2010
15750       </div>
15751       <div class="body">
15752         <p>As I continue to explore
15753 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
15754 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
15755 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
15756
15757 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
15758 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
15759 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
15760 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
15761 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
15762 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
15763 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
15764 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
15765 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
15766 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
15767 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
15768 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
15769 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
15770 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
15771 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
15772 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
15773 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
15774 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
15775 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
15776 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
15777
15778 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
15779 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
15780 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
15781 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
15782 If the Skolelinux foundation
15783 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
15784 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
15785 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
15786 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
15787 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
15788 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
15789 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
15790 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
15791
15792 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
15793 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
15794 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
15795 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
15796 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
15797 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
15798 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
15799 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
15800 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
15801 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
15802 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
15803 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
15804 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
15805 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
15806 currencies.</p>
15807
15808 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
15809 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
15810 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
15811 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
15812 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
15813 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
15814 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
15815 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
15816 BitCoins.  Check out
15817 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
15818 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
15819 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
15820 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
15821 yet.</p>
15822
15823 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
15824 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
15825 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
15826 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
15827 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
15828
15829       </div>
15830       <div class="tags">
15831
15832
15833         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>.
15834
15835
15836       </div>
15837     </div>
15838     <div class="padding"></div>
15839
15840     <div class="entry">
15841       <div class="title">
15842         <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>
15843       </div>
15844       <div class="date">
15845         10th December 2010
15846       </div>
15847       <div class="body">
15848         <p>With this weeks lawless
15849 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
15850 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
15851 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
15852 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
15853 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
15854 A blog post from
15855 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
15856 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
15857 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
15858 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
15859 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
15860 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
15861 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
15862
15863 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
15864 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
15865 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
15866 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
15867 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
15868 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
15869 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
15870 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
15871 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
15872 Debian</a> soon.</p>
15873
15874 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
15875 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
15876 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
15877 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
15878 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
15879 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
15880 you can even get
15881 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
15882 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
15883 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
15884 on the current exchange rates.</p>
15885
15886 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
15887 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
15888 donations to the address
15889 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
15890
15891       </div>
15892       <div class="tags">
15893
15894
15895         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>.
15896
15897
15898       </div>
15899     </div>
15900     <div class="padding"></div>
15901
15902     <div class="entry">
15903       <div class="title">
15904         <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>
15905       </div>
15906       <div class="date">
15907          9th December 2010
15908       </div>
15909       <div class="body">
15910         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
15911 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
15912 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
15913 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
15914 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
15915 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
15916 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
15917 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
15918 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
15919 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
15920 operational.</p>
15921
15922 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
15923 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
15924 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
15925 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
15926 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
15927 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
15928 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
15929
15930       </div>
15931       <div class="tags">
15932
15933
15934         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>.
15935
15936
15937       </div>
15938     </div>
15939     <div class="padding"></div>
15940
15941     <div class="entry">
15942       <div class="title">
15943         <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>
15944       </div>
15945       <div class="date">
15946         29th November 2010
15947       </div>
15948       <div class="body">
15949         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15950 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
15951 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
15952 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
15953 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
15954 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
15955
15956 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
15957 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
15958 will hold its
15959 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
15960 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
15961 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
15962 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
15963 vote this year.</p>
15964
15965       </div>
15966       <div class="tags">
15967
15968
15969         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15970
15971
15972       </div>
15973     </div>
15974     <div class="padding"></div>
15975
15976     <div class="entry">
15977       <div class="title">
15978         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
15979       </div>
15980       <div class="date">
15981         27th November 2010
15982       </div>
15983       <div class="body">
15984         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
15985 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
15986 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
15987 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
15988 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
15989 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
15990 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
15991 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
15992
15993 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
15994 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
15995 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
15996 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
15997 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
15998 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
15999 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
16000 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
16001 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
16002 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
16003 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
16004
16005 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
16006 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
16007 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
16008 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
16009 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
16010 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
16011 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
16012 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
16013 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
16014 what is going on.</p>
16015
16016       </div>
16017       <div class="tags">
16018
16019
16020         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>.
16021
16022
16023       </div>
16024     </div>
16025     <div class="padding"></div>
16026
16027     <div class="entry">
16028       <div class="title">
16029         <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>
16030       </div>
16031       <div class="date">
16032         22nd November 2010
16033       </div>
16034       <div class="body">
16035         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
16036 upgrade testing of the
16037 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16038 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
16039 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
16040 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
16041
16042 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16043
16044 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16045
16046 <blockquote><p>
16047   apache2.2-bin
16048   aptdaemon
16049   baobab
16050   binfmt-support
16051   browser-plugin-gnash
16052   cheese-common
16053   cli-common
16054   cups-pk-helper
16055   dmz-cursor-theme
16056   empathy
16057   empathy-common
16058   freedesktop-sound-theme
16059   freeglut3
16060   gconf-defaults-service
16061   gdm-themes
16062   gedit-plugins
16063   geoclue
16064   geoclue-hostip
16065   geoclue-localnet
16066   geoclue-manual
16067   geoclue-yahoo
16068   gnash
16069   gnash-common
16070   gnome
16071   gnome-backgrounds
16072   gnome-cards-data
16073   gnome-codec-install
16074   gnome-core
16075   gnome-desktop-environment
16076   gnome-disk-utility
16077   gnome-screenshot
16078   gnome-search-tool
16079   gnome-session-canberra
16080   gnome-system-log
16081   gnome-themes-extras
16082   gnome-themes-more
16083   gnome-user-share
16084   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
16085   gstreamer0.10-tools
16086   gtk2-engines
16087   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
16088   gtk2-engines-smooth
16089   hamster-applet
16090   libapache2-mod-dnssd
16091   libapr1
16092   libaprutil1
16093   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
16094   libaprutil1-ldap
16095   libart2.0-cil
16096   libboost-date-time1.42.0
16097   libboost-python1.42.0
16098   libboost-thread1.42.0
16099   libchamplain-0.4-0
16100   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
16101   libcheese-gtk18
16102   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
16103   libcryptui0
16104   libdiscid0
16105   libelf1
16106   libepc-1.0-2
16107   libepc-common
16108   libepc-ui-1.0-2
16109   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
16110   libfreerdp0
16111   libgconf2.0-cil
16112   libgdata-common
16113   libgdata7
16114   libgdu-gtk0
16115   libgee2
16116   libgeoclue0
16117   libgexiv2-0
16118   libgif4
16119   libglade2.0-cil
16120   libglib2.0-cil
16121   libgmime2.4-cil
16122   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
16123   libgnome2.24-cil
16124   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
16125   libgpod-common
16126   libgpod4
16127   libgtk2.0-cil
16128   libgtkglext1
16129   libgtksourceview2.0-common
16130   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
16131   libmono-addins0.2-cil
16132   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
16133   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
16134   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
16135   libmono-posix2.0-cil
16136   libmono-security2.0-cil
16137   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
16138   libmono-system2.0-cil
16139   libmtp8
16140   libmusicbrainz3-6
16141   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
16142   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
16143   libopal3.6.8
16144   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
16145   libpt2.6.7
16146   libpython2.6
16147   librpm1
16148   librpmio1
16149   libsdl1.2debian
16150   libsrtp0
16151   libssh-4
16152   libtelepathy-farsight0
16153   libtelepathy-glib0
16154   libtidy-0.99-0
16155   media-player-info
16156   mesa-utils
16157   mono-2.0-gac
16158   mono-gac
16159   mono-runtime
16160   nautilus-sendto
16161   nautilus-sendto-empathy
16162   p7zip-full
16163   pkg-config
16164   python-aptdaemon
16165   python-aptdaemon-gtk
16166   python-axiom
16167   python-beautifulsoup
16168   python-bugbuddy
16169   python-clientform
16170   python-coherence
16171   python-configobj
16172   python-crypto
16173   python-cupshelpers
16174   python-elementtree
16175   python-epsilon
16176   python-evolution
16177   python-feedparser
16178   python-gdata
16179   python-gdbm
16180   python-gst0.10
16181   python-gtkglext1
16182   python-gtksourceview2
16183   python-httplib2
16184   python-louie
16185   python-mako
16186   python-markupsafe
16187   python-mechanize
16188   python-nevow
16189   python-notify
16190   python-opengl
16191   python-openssl
16192   python-pam
16193   python-pkg-resources
16194   python-pyasn1
16195   python-pysqlite2
16196   python-rdflib
16197   python-serial
16198   python-tagpy
16199   python-twisted-bin
16200   python-twisted-conch
16201   python-twisted-core
16202   python-twisted-web
16203   python-utidylib
16204   python-webkit
16205   python-xdg
16206   python-zope.interface
16207   remmina
16208   remmina-plugin-data
16209   remmina-plugin-rdp
16210   remmina-plugin-vnc
16211   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
16212   rhythmbox-plugins
16213   rpm-common
16214   rpm2cpio
16215   seahorse-plugins
16216   shotwell
16217   software-center
16218   system-config-printer-udev
16219   telepathy-gabble
16220   telepathy-mission-control-5
16221   telepathy-salut
16222   tomboy
16223   totem
16224   totem-coherence
16225   totem-mozilla
16226   totem-plugins
16227   transmission-common
16228   xdg-user-dirs
16229   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
16230   xserver-xephyr
16231 </p></blockquote>
16232
16233 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16234
16235 <blockquote><p>
16236   cheese
16237   ekiga
16238   eog
16239   epiphany-extensions
16240   evolution-exchange
16241   fast-user-switch-applet
16242   file-roller
16243   gcalctool
16244   gconf-editor
16245   gdm
16246   gedit
16247   gedit-common
16248   gnome-games
16249   gnome-games-data
16250   gnome-nettool
16251   gnome-system-tools
16252   gnome-themes
16253   gnuchess
16254   gucharmap
16255   guile-1.8-libs
16256   libavahi-ui0
16257   libdmx1
16258   libgalago3
16259   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
16260   libgtksourceview2.0-0
16261   liblircclient0
16262   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
16263   libspeexdsp1
16264   libsvga1
16265   rhythmbox
16266   seahorse
16267   sound-juicer
16268   system-config-printer
16269   totem-common
16270   transmission-gtk
16271   vinagre
16272   vino
16273 </p></blockquote>
16274
16275 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16276
16277 <blockquote><p>
16278   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
16279 </p></blockquote>
16280
16281 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16282
16283 <blockquote><p>
16284 [nothing]
16285 </p></blockquote>
16286
16287 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
16288
16289 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16290
16291 <blockquote><p>
16292   ksmserver
16293 </p></blockquote>
16294
16295 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16296
16297 <blockquote><p>
16298   kwin
16299   network-manager-kde
16300 </p></blockquote>
16301
16302 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16303
16304 <blockquote><p>
16305   arts
16306   dolphin
16307   freespacenotifier
16308   google-gadgets-gst
16309   google-gadgets-xul
16310   kappfinder
16311   kcalc
16312   kcharselect
16313   kde-core
16314   kde-plasma-desktop
16315   kde-standard
16316   kde-window-manager
16317   kdeartwork
16318   kdeartwork-emoticons
16319   kdeartwork-style
16320   kdeartwork-theme-icon
16321   kdebase
16322   kdebase-apps
16323   kdebase-workspace
16324   kdebase-workspace-bin
16325   kdebase-workspace-data
16326   kdeeject
16327   kdelibs
16328   kdeplasma-addons
16329   kdeutils
16330   kdewallpapers
16331   kdf
16332   kfloppy
16333   kgpg
16334   khelpcenter4
16335   kinfocenter
16336   konq-plugins-l10n
16337   konqueror-nsplugins
16338   kscreensaver
16339   kscreensaver-xsavers
16340   ktimer
16341   kwrite
16342   libgle3
16343   libkde4-ruby1.8
16344   libkonq5
16345   libkonq5-templates
16346   libnetpbm10
16347   libplasma-ruby
16348   libplasma-ruby1.8
16349   libqt4-ruby1.8
16350   marble-data
16351   marble-plugins
16352   netpbm
16353   nuvola-icon-theme
16354   plasma-dataengines-workspace
16355   plasma-desktop
16356   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
16357   plasma-runners-addons
16358   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
16359   plasma-scriptengine-python
16360   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
16361   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
16362   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
16363   plasma-scriptengines
16364   plasma-wallpapers-addons
16365   plasma-widget-folderview
16366   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
16367   ruby
16368   sweeper
16369   update-notifier-kde
16370   xscreensaver-data-extra
16371   xscreensaver-gl
16372   xscreensaver-gl-extra
16373   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
16374 </p></blockquote>
16375
16376 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16377
16378 <blockquote><p>
16379   ark
16380   google-gadgets-common
16381   google-gadgets-qt
16382   htdig
16383   kate
16384   kdebase-bin
16385   kdebase-data
16386   kdepasswd
16387   kfind
16388   klipper
16389   konq-plugins
16390   konqueror
16391   ksysguard
16392   ksysguardd
16393   libarchive1
16394   libcln6
16395   libeet1
16396   libeina-svn-06
16397   libggadget-1.0-0b
16398   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
16399   libgps19
16400   libkdecorations4
16401   libkephal4
16402   libkonq4
16403   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
16404   libkscreensaver5
16405   libksgrd4
16406   libksignalplotter4
16407   libkunitconversion4
16408   libkwineffects1a
16409   libmarblewidget4
16410   libntrack-qt4-1
16411   libntrack0
16412   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
16413   libplasmaclock4a
16414   libplasmagenericshell4
16415   libprocesscore4a
16416   libprocessui4a
16417   libqalculate5
16418   libqedje0a
16419   libqtruby4shared2
16420   libqzion0a
16421   libruby1.8
16422   libscim8c2a
16423   libsmokekdecore4-3
16424   libsmokekdeui4-3
16425   libsmokekfile3
16426   libsmokekhtml3
16427   libsmokekio3
16428   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
16429   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
16430   libsmokekparts3
16431   libsmokektexteditor3
16432   libsmokekutils3
16433   libsmokenepomuk3
16434   libsmokephonon3
16435   libsmokeplasma3
16436   libsmokeqtcore4-3
16437   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
16438   libsmokeqtgui4-3
16439   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
16440   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
16441   libsmokeqtscript4-3
16442   libsmokeqtsql4-3
16443   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
16444   libsmokeqttest4-3
16445   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
16446   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
16447   libsmokeqtxml4-3
16448   libsmokesolid3
16449   libsmokesoprano3
16450   libtaskmanager4a
16451   libtidy-0.99-0
16452   libweather-ion4a
16453   libxklavier16
16454   libxxf86misc1
16455   okteta
16456   oxygencursors
16457   plasma-dataengines-addons
16458   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
16459   plasma-widget-lancelot
16460   plasma-widgets-addons
16461   plasma-widgets-workspace
16462   polkit-kde-1
16463   ruby1.8
16464   systemsettings
16465   update-notifier-common
16466 </p></blockquote>
16467
16468 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
16469 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
16470 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
16471 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
16472
16473       </div>
16474       <div class="tags">
16475
16476
16477         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>.
16478
16479
16480       </div>
16481     </div>
16482     <div class="padding"></div>
16483
16484     <div class="entry">
16485       <div class="title">
16486         <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>
16487       </div>
16488       <div class="date">
16489         22nd November 2010
16490       </div>
16491       <div class="body">
16492         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
16493 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
16494 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
16495 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
16496 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
16497 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
16498 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
16499 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
16500 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
16501
16502 <p>I found
16503 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
16504 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
16505 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
16506 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
16507 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
16508 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
16509
16510 <pre>
16511 #!/bin/sh
16512
16513 # Based on
16514 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
16515
16516 set -e
16517 set -x
16518
16519 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
16520     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
16521     exit 1
16522 else
16523     host="$1"
16524 fi
16525
16526 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
16527     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
16528     exit 1
16529 fi
16530
16531 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
16532 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
16533 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
16534 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
16535
16536 img=$host.img
16537 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
16538 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
16539
16540 parted $img mklabel msdos
16541 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
16542 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
16543 parted $img set 1 boot on
16544
16545 modprobe dm-mod
16546 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
16547 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
16548
16549 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
16550 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
16551 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
16552
16553 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
16554 losetup -d /dev/loop0
16555 </pre>
16556
16557 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
16558 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
16559
16560 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
16561 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
16562 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
16563 seem to work just fine.</p>
16564
16565       </div>
16566       <div class="tags">
16567
16568
16569         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>.
16570
16571
16572       </div>
16573     </div>
16574     <div class="padding"></div>
16575
16576     <div class="entry">
16577       <div class="title">
16578         <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>
16579       </div>
16580       <div class="date">
16581         20th November 2010
16582       </div>
16583       <div class="body">
16584         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
16585 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16586 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
16587 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
16588
16589 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
16590 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
16591 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
16592
16593 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16594
16595 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16596
16597 <blockquote><p>
16598   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
16599   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
16600   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
16601   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
16602   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
16603   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
16604   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
16605   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
16606   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
16607   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
16608   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
16609   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
16610   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
16611   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
16612   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
16613   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
16614   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
16615   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
16616   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
16617   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
16618   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
16619   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
16620   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
16621   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
16622   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
16623   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
16624   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
16625   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
16626   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
16627   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
16628   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
16629   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
16630   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
16631   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
16632   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
16633   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
16634   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
16635   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
16636   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
16637   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
16638   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
16639   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
16640   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
16641   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
16642   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
16643   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
16644   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
16645   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
16646   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
16647   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
16648   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
16649   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
16650   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
16651   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
16652   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
16653   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
16654   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
16655   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
16656   zip
16657 </p></blockquote>
16658
16659 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
16660
16661 <blockquote><p>
16662   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
16663   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
16664   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
16665   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
16666   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
16667   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
16668   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
16669   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
16670   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
16671   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
16672   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
16673   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
16674   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
16675   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
16676   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
16677   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
16678   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
16679   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
16680   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
16681   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
16682   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
16683   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
16684   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
16685   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
16686   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
16687   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
16688   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
16689   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
16690   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
16691 </p></blockquote>
16692
16693 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16694
16695 <blockquote><p>
16696   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
16697 </p></blockquote>
16698
16699 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16700
16701 <blockquote><p>
16702 [nothing]
16703 </p></blockquote>
16704
16705 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
16706
16707 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16708
16709 <blockquote><p>
16710   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
16711   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
16712   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
16713   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
16714   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
16715   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
16716   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
16717   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
16718   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
16719   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
16720   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
16721   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
16722   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
16723   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
16724   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
16725   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
16726   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
16727   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
16728   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
16729   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
16730   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
16731   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
16732   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
16733   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
16734   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
16735   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
16736   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
16737   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
16738   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
16739   ttf-sazanami-gothic
16740 </p></blockquote>
16741
16742 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16743
16744 <blockquote><p>
16745   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
16746   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
16747   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
16748   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
16749   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
16750   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
16751   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
16752   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
16753   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
16754   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
16755   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
16756   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
16757   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
16758   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
16759   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
16760   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
16761   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
16762   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
16763   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
16764   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
16765   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
16766   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
16767   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
16768   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
16769   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
16770   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
16771   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
16772   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
16773   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
16774   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
16775   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
16776   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
16777   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
16778 </p></blockquote>
16779
16780 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16781
16782 <blockquote><p>
16783   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
16784   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
16785   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
16786   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
16787   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
16788   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
16789   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
16790 </p></blockquote>
16791
16792 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16793
16794 <blockquote><p>
16795   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
16796 </p></blockquote>
16797
16798       </div>
16799       <div class="tags">
16800
16801
16802         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>.
16803
16804
16805       </div>
16806     </div>
16807     <div class="padding"></div>
16808
16809     <div class="entry">
16810       <div class="title">
16811         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
16812       </div>
16813       <div class="date">
16814         20th November 2010
16815       </div>
16816       <div class="body">
16817         <p>Answering
16818 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
16819 call from the Gnash project</a> for
16820 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
16821 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
16822 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
16823 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
16824 releases out more often.</p>
16825
16826 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
16827 I have considered setting up a <a
16828 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
16829 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
16830 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
16831 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
16832 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
16833 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
16834 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
16835 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
16836 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
16837 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
16838 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
16839 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
16840
16841       </div>
16842       <div class="tags">
16843
16844
16845         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>.
16846
16847
16848       </div>
16849     </div>
16850     <div class="padding"></div>
16851
16852     <div class="entry">
16853       <div class="title">
16854         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
16855       </div>
16856       <div class="date">
16857          9th November 2010
16858       </div>
16859       <div class="body">
16860         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
16861
16862 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
16863 3D linked in from
16864 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
16865 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
16866
16867       </div>
16868       <div class="tags">
16869
16870
16871         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>.
16872
16873
16874       </div>
16875     </div>
16876     <div class="padding"></div>
16877
16878     <div class="entry">
16879       <div class="title">
16880         <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>
16881       </div>
16882       <div class="date">
16883          7th November 2010
16884       </div>
16885       <div class="body">
16886         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
16887 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
16888 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
16889 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
16890 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
16891 working using this DVD.</p>
16892
16893 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
16894 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
16895 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
16896 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
16897 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
16898 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
16899 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
16900
16901 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
16902 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
16903 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
16904 Debian archive.</p>
16905
16906 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
16907 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
16908 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
16909 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
16910 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
16911 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
16912 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
16913 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
16914 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
16915 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
16916 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
16917 free X driver should work.</p>
16918
16919 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
16920 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
16921 DVD more useful again.</p>
16922
16923       </div>
16924       <div class="tags">
16925
16926
16927         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
16928
16929
16930       </div>
16931     </div>
16932     <div class="padding"></div>
16933
16934     <div class="entry">
16935       <div class="title">
16936         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
16937       </div>
16938       <div class="date">
16939         24th October 2010
16940       </div>
16941       <div class="body">
16942         <p>Some updates.</p>
16943
16944 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
16945 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
16946 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
16947 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
16948 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
16949 :)</p>
16950
16951 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
16952 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
16953 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
16954 It is called
16955 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
16956 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
16957 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
16958 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
16959 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
16960 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
16961
16962 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
16963 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
16964 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
16965 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
16966 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
16967 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
16968 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
16969 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
16970 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
16971 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
16972
16973       </div>
16974       <div class="tags">
16975
16976
16977         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>.
16978
16979
16980       </div>
16981     </div>
16982     <div class="padding"></div>
16983
16984     <div class="entry">
16985       <div class="title">
16986         <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>
16987       </div>
16988       <div class="date">
16989         19th October 2010
16990       </div>
16991       <div class="body">
16992         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
16993 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
16994 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
16995 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
16996 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
16997 AVM2 flash files.</p>
16998
16999 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
17000 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
17001 following text:</P>
17002
17003 <p><blockquote>
17004
17005   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
17006   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
17007
17008   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
17009
17010   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
17011
17012   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
17013   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
17014   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
17015   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
17016   days. The project web page is available from
17017   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
17018   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
17019   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
17020
17021   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
17022   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
17023   to get this to happen.</p>
17024
17025   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
17026   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
17027
17028 </blockquote></p>
17029
17030 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
17031 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
17032 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
17033 :)</p>
17034
17035       </div>
17036       <div class="tags">
17037
17038
17039         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>.
17040
17041
17042       </div>
17043     </div>
17044     <div class="padding"></div>
17045
17046     <div class="entry">
17047       <div class="title">
17048         <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>
17049       </div>
17050       <div class="date">
17051          9th October 2010
17052       </div>
17053       <div class="body">
17054         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
17055 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
17056 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
17057 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
17058 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
17059 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
17060 robots.</p>
17061
17062 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
17063 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
17064 a few less important features too.</p>
17065
17066 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
17067 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
17068 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
17069 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
17070
17071 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
17072 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
17073 source or binary package:</p>
17074
17075 <p><ul>
17076 <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>
17077 <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>
17078 <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>
17079 </ul></p>
17080
17081 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
17082 please let me know.</p>
17083
17084       </div>
17085       <div class="tags">
17086
17087
17088         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>.
17089
17090
17091       </div>
17092     </div>
17093     <div class="padding"></div>
17094
17095     <div class="entry">
17096       <div class="title">
17097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
17098       </div>
17099       <div class="date">
17100          3rd October 2010
17101       </div>
17102       <div class="body">
17103         <p><ul>
17104
17105 <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
17106 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
17107
17108 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
17109 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
17110 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
17111
17112 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
17113 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
17114 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
17115 simple setup.
17116
17117 </ul></p>
17118
17119       </div>
17120       <div class="tags">
17121
17122
17123         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>.
17124
17125
17126       </div>
17127     </div>
17128     <div class="padding"></div>
17129
17130     <div class="entry">
17131       <div class="title">
17132         <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>
17133       </div>
17134       <div class="date">
17135          9th September 2010
17136       </div>
17137       <div class="body">
17138         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
17139 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
17140 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
17141 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
17142 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
17143 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
17144 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
17145 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
17146 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
17147
17148 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
17149 written:</p>
17150
17151 <blockquote>
17152 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
17153 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
17154 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
17155 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
17156 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
17157
17158 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
17159 standard.</p>
17160 </blockquote>
17161
17162 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
17163 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
17164 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
17165 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
17166
17167 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
17168 read
17169 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
17170 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
17171 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
17172 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
17173 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
17174 the issue.  The solution is to support the
17175 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
17176 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
17177 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
17178
17179       </div>
17180       <div class="tags">
17181
17182
17183         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17184
17185
17186       </div>
17187     </div>
17188     <div class="padding"></div>
17189
17190     <div class="entry">
17191       <div class="title">
17192         <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>
17193       </div>
17194       <div class="date">
17195          4th September 2010
17196       </div>
17197       <div class="body">
17198         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
17199 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
17200 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
17201 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
17202 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
17203 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
17204 installed.</p>
17205
17206 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
17207 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
17208 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
17209 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
17210 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
17211 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
17212 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
17213 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
17214 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
17215
17216 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
17217 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
17218 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
17219 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
17220 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
17221 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
17222 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
17223 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
17224 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
17225 pages they want to visit.</p>
17226
17227 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
17228 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
17229 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
17230 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
17231 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
17232 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
17233 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
17234 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
17235 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
17236 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
17237 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
17238
17239       </div>
17240       <div class="tags">
17241
17242
17243         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>.
17244
17245
17246       </div>
17247     </div>
17248     <div class="padding"></div>
17249
17250     <div class="entry">
17251       <div class="title">
17252         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
17253       </div>
17254       <div class="date">
17255          1st September 2010
17256       </div>
17257       <div class="body">
17258         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
17259 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
17260 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
17261 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
17262 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
17263 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
17264 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
17265 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
17266 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
17267 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
17268 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
17269 drive around.</p>
17270
17271 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
17272 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
17273
17274 <p><pre>
17275 use Spykee;
17276 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
17277 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
17278 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
17279 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
17280 $spykee->left();
17281 sleep 2;
17282 $spykee->right();
17283 sleep 2;
17284 $spykee->forward();
17285 sleep 2;
17286 $spykee->back();
17287 sleep 2;
17288 $spykee->stop();
17289 </pre></p>
17290
17291 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
17292 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
17293 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
17294 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
17295 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
17296 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
17297 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
17298 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
17299 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
17300 going. :).</p>
17301
17302 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
17303 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
17304 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
17305 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
17306
17307       </div>
17308       <div class="tags">
17309
17310
17311         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>.
17312
17313
17314       </div>
17315     </div>
17316     <div class="padding"></div>
17317
17318     <div class="entry">
17319       <div class="title">
17320         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
17321       </div>
17322       <div class="date">
17323         30th August 2010
17324       </div>
17325       <div class="body">
17326         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
17327 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
17328 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
17329 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
17330 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
17331 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
17332 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
17333
17334 <pre>
17335 % ln foo bar
17336 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
17337 %
17338 </pre>
17339
17340 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
17341 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
17342 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
17343 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
17344 nevertheless. :)</p>
17345
17346 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
17347 git from
17348 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
17349
17350       </div>
17351       <div class="tags">
17352
17353
17354         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17355
17356
17357       </div>
17358     </div>
17359     <div class="padding"></div>
17360
17361     <div class="entry">
17362       <div class="title">
17363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
17364       </div>
17365       <div class="date">
17366         26th August 2010
17367       </div>
17368       <div class="body">
17369         <p>My file system sematics program
17370 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
17371 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
17372 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
17373 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
17374 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
17375 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
17376 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
17377 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
17378 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
17379 script:</p>
17380
17381 <pre>
17382 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
17383   mode_t retval = 0;
17384   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
17385   if (-1 != fd) {
17386     unlink(name);
17387     struct stat statbuf;
17388     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
17389       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
17390     }
17391     close(fd);
17392   }
17393   return retval;
17394 }
17395
17396 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
17397 int test_umask(void) {
17398   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
17399
17400   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
17401   mode_t newmode;
17402   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
17403     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
17404            newmode);
17405   }
17406   umask(007);
17407   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
17408     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
17409            newmode);
17410   }
17411
17412   umask (orig_umask);
17413   return 0;
17414 }
17415
17416 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
17417   [...]
17418   test_umask();
17419   return 0;
17420 }
17421 </pre>
17422
17423 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
17424
17425 <pre>
17426 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
17427 info: testing symlink creation
17428 info: testing subdirectory creation
17429 info: testing fcntl locking
17430   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17431   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17432   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
17433   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17434   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17435   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
17436 info: testing umask effect on file creation
17437 </pre>
17438
17439 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
17440 result:</p>
17441
17442 <pre>
17443 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
17444 info: testing symlink creation
17445 info: testing subdirectory creation
17446 info: testing fcntl locking
17447   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17448   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17449   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
17450   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17451   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17452   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
17453 info: testing umask effect on file creation
17454   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
17455   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
17456 </pre>
17457
17458 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
17459 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
17460 directory.</p>
17461
17462 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
17463 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
17464
17465 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
17466 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
17467 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
17468
17469       </div>
17470       <div class="tags">
17471
17472
17473         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17474
17475
17476       </div>
17477     </div>
17478     <div class="padding"></div>
17479
17480     <div class="entry">
17481       <div class="title">
17482         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
17483       </div>
17484       <div class="date">
17485         15th August 2010
17486       </div>
17487       <div class="body">
17488         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
17489 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
17490 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
17491 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
17492 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
17493 long time.</p>
17494
17495       </div>
17496       <div class="tags">
17497
17498
17499         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>.
17500
17501
17502       </div>
17503     </div>
17504     <div class="padding"></div>
17505
17506     <div class="entry">
17507       <div class="title">
17508         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
17509       </div>
17510       <div class="date">
17511          9th August 2010
17512       </div>
17513       <div class="body">
17514         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
17515 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
17516 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
17517 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
17518 generated configuration.</p>
17519
17520 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
17521 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
17522 without any manual configuration.</p>
17523
17524 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
17525 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
17526 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
17527 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
17528 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
17529 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
17530 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
17531 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
17532 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
17533 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
17534 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
17535 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
17536 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
17537 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
17538 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
17539 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
17540 use.</p>
17541
17542 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
17543 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
17544 working properly out of the box:</p>
17545
17546 <ul>
17547 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
17548 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
17549 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
17550 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
17551 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
17552 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
17553 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
17554 </ul>
17555
17556 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
17557
17558 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
17559 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
17560 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
17561 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
17562 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
17563
17564 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
17565 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
17566 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
17567 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
17568 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
17569 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
17570 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
17571 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
17572
17573 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
17574 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
17575 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
17576 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
17577 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
17578 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
17579 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
17580 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
17581 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
17582 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
17583 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
17584 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
17585 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
17586 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
17587 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
17588 current DNS domain is used.</p>
17589
17590 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
17591 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
17592 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
17593 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
17594 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
17595 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
17596 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
17597 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
17598 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
17599 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
17600 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
17601 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
17602 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
17603
17604 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
17605 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
17606 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
17607 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
17608 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
17609 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
17610 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
17611 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
17612 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
17613 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
17614 do for now. :)</p>
17615
17616 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
17617 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
17618 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
17619 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
17620 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
17621 yet.</p>
17622
17623 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
17624 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17625
17626 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
17627 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
17628 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
17629 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
17630
17631       </div>
17632       <div class="tags">
17633
17634
17635         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17636
17637
17638       </div>
17639     </div>
17640     <div class="padding"></div>
17641
17642     <div class="entry">
17643       <div class="title">
17644         <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>
17645       </div>
17646       <div class="date">
17647          8th August 2010
17648       </div>
17649       <div class="body">
17650         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
17651 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
17652 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
17653 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
17654 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
17655 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
17656 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
17657
17658 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
17659 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
17660 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
17661 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
17662 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
17663 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
17664 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
17665
17666 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
17667 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
17668 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
17669 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
17670 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
17671
17672 <pre>
17673 /*
17674  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
17675  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
17676  * directory.
17677  * License: GPL v2 or later
17678  *
17679  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
17680  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
17681 */
17682
17683 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
17684 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
17685 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
17686
17687 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
17688
17689 #include &lt;errno.h>
17690 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
17691 #include &lt;stdio.h>
17692 #include &lt;string.h>
17693 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
17694 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
17695 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
17696 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
17697 #include &lt;unistd.h>
17698
17699 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
17700 /*
17701  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
17702  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
17703  * below.
17704  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
17705  */
17706 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
17707 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
17708   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
17709 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
17710   char *zErrMsg;
17711   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
17712   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
17713   unlink(name);
17714   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
17715   if( rc ){
17716     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
17717     sqlite3_close(db);
17718     return -1;
17719   }
17720
17721   /* create tables */
17722   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
17723   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
17724     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
17725     sqlite3_close(db);
17726     return -1;
17727   }
17728   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
17729   sqlite3_close(db);
17730   return 0;
17731 }
17732 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
17733
17734 /*
17735  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
17736  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
17737  * done in the sqlite3 library.
17738  * See also
17739  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
17740  * POSIX specification
17741  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
17742  */
17743 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
17744   struct flock fl;
17745   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
17746   unlink(name);
17747   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
17748   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
17749
17750   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
17751   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
17752   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17753   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17754   fl.l_len    = 1;
17755   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
17756   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17757
17758   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
17759   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
17760   fl.l_len    = 510;
17761   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
17762   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17763
17764   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17765   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17766   fl.l_len    = 1;
17767   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
17768   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17769
17770   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17771   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17772   fl.l_len    = 1;
17773   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
17774   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17775
17776   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
17777   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
17778   fl.l_len    = 510;
17779   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17780
17781   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
17782   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17783   fl.l_len    = 2;
17784   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
17785   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17786
17787   close(fd);
17788   return 0;
17789 }
17790
17791 /*
17792  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
17793  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
17794  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
17795  * slowing down file operations.
17796  */
17797 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
17798 #define LEVELS 5
17799   char *path = strdup("test");
17800   char *dirs[LEVELS];
17801   int level;
17802   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
17803   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
17804     char *newpath = NULL;
17805     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
17806       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
17807              path, strerror(errno));
17808       break;
17809     }
17810     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
17811     free(path);
17812     path = newpath;
17813   }
17814   return 0;
17815 }
17816
17817 /*
17818  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
17819  * KDE.
17820  */
17821 int test_symlinks(void) {
17822   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
17823   unlink("symlink");
17824   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
17825     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
17826   return 0;
17827 }
17828
17829 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
17830   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
17831   test_symlinks();
17832   test_subdirectory_creation();
17833 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
17834   test_sqlite_open();
17835 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
17836   test_gcompris_locking();
17837   return 0;
17838 }
17839 </pre>
17840
17841 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
17842 this:</p>
17843
17844 <pre>
17845 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
17846 info: testing symlink creation
17847 info: testing subdirectory creation
17848 info: sqlite worked
17849 info: testing fcntl locking
17850   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17851   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17852   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
17853   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17854   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17855   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
17856 </pre>
17857
17858 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
17859 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
17860 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
17861 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
17862 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
17863 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
17864 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
17865 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
17866
17867 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
17868 it. :)</p>
17869
17870 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
17871 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
17872 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
17873
17874       </div>
17875       <div class="tags">
17876
17877
17878         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17879
17880
17881       </div>
17882     </div>
17883     <div class="padding"></div>
17884
17885     <div class="entry">
17886       <div class="title">
17887         <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>
17888       </div>
17889       <div class="date">
17890          7th August 2010
17891       </div>
17892       <div class="body">
17893         <p>A few days ago, I
17894 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
17895 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
17896 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
17897 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
17898 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
17899 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
17900 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
17901 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
17902 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
17903
17904 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
17905 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
17906 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
17907 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
17908 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
17909 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
17910 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
17911 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
17912 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
17913 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
17914 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
17915 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
17916 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
17917 gave it a IP address.</p>
17918
17919 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
17920 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
17921 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
17922 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
17923 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
17924 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
17925 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
17926 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
17927
17928 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
17929 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
17930 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
17931 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
17932 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
17933 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
17934
17935 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
17936 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
17937 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
17938 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
17939 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
17940 with UID and GID values.</p>
17941
17942 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
17943 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17944
17945       </div>
17946       <div class="tags">
17947
17948
17949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17950
17951
17952       </div>
17953     </div>
17954     <div class="padding"></div>
17955
17956     <div class="entry">
17957       <div class="title">
17958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
17959       </div>
17960       <div class="date">
17961          3rd August 2010
17962       </div>
17963       <div class="body">
17964         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
17965 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
17966 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
17967 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
17968 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
17969 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
17970 servers.</p>
17971
17972 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
17973 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
17974 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
17975 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
17976 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
17977 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
17978 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
17979 .uio.no.</p>
17980
17981 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
17982 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
17983 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
17984 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
17985 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
17986 university servers.</p>
17987
17988 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
17989 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
17990 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
17991 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
17992 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
17993 uses.</p>
17994
17995       </div>
17996       <div class="tags">
17997
17998
17999         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18000
18001
18002       </div>
18003     </div>
18004     <div class="padding"></div>
18005
18006     <div class="entry">
18007       <div class="title">
18008         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
18009       </div>
18010       <div class="date">
18011         27th July 2010
18012       </div>
18013       <div class="body">
18014         <p>I discovered this while doing
18015 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
18016 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
18017 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
18018 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
18019 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
18020
18021 <p>An example is from todays
18022 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
18023 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
18024 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
18025 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
18026 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
18027 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
18028 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
18029
18030 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
18031
18032 <blockquote><pre>
18033 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
18034  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
18035   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
18036 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
18037  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
18038 </pre></blockquote>
18039
18040 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
18041 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
18042 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
18043 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
18044 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
18045 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
18046 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
18047 of dependency loops.</p>
18048
18049 <p>Thanks to
18050 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
18051 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
18052 dependencies
18053 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
18054 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
18055
18056 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
18057 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
18058 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
18059 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
18060 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
18061 it.</p>
18062
18063       </div>
18064       <div class="tags">
18065
18066
18067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
18068
18069
18070       </div>
18071     </div>
18072     <div class="padding"></div>
18073
18074     <div class="entry">
18075       <div class="title">
18076         <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>
18077       </div>
18078       <div class="date">
18079         27th July 2010
18080       </div>
18081       <div class="body">
18082         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
18083 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
18084 completed.</p>
18085
18086 <blockquote>
18087 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
18088 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
18089 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
18090 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
18091 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
18092 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
18093 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
18094 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
18095
18096 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
18097 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
18098 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
18099
18100 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
18101 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
18102 much.</p>
18103
18104 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
18105
18106 <ul>
18107 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
18108 <ul>
18109   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
18110          combination with some new artwork
18111   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
18112   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
18113   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
18114   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
18115   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
18116   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
18117   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
18118   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
18119   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
18120 </ul></li>
18121 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
18122     Enabled for:
18123 <ul>
18124   <li>PAM
18125   <li>LDAP
18126   <li>IMAP
18127   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
18128 </ul>
18129 </li>
18130 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
18131 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
18132     fetched from LDAP.</li>
18133 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
18134 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
18135 </ul>
18136 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
18137
18138 <ul>
18139 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
18140     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
18141     for testing.</li>
18142 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
18143     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
18144     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
18145 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
18146 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
18147 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
18148 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
18149     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
18150 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
18151     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
18152     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
18153 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
18154     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
18155     and help out with translations.</li>
18156 </ul>
18157
18158 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
18159
18160 <ul>
18161 <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>
18162 <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>
18163 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18164 </ul>
18165 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
18166
18167 <ul>
18168 <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>
18169 <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>
18170 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18171 </ul>
18172
18173 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
18174 get closer to the final release.</p>
18175
18176 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
18177
18178 <ul>
18179 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18180 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18181 </ul>
18182
18183 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
18184 <ul>
18185 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18186 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18187 </ul>
18188 <p>How to report bugs:
18189 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
18190
18191 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
18192 </blockquote>
18193
18194       </div>
18195       <div class="tags">
18196
18197
18198         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18199
18200
18201       </div>
18202     </div>
18203     <div class="padding"></div>
18204
18205     <div class="entry">
18206       <div class="title">
18207         <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>
18208       </div>
18209       <div class="date">
18210         25th July 2010
18211       </div>
18212       <div class="body">
18213         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
18214 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
18215 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
18216 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
18217 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
18218
18219 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
18220 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
18221 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
18222 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
18223 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
18224 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
18225 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
18226
18227 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
18228 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
18229 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
18230 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
18231 up. :)</p>
18232
18233 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
18234 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
18235 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
18236
18237 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
18238 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
18239 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
18240 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
18241 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
18242 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
18243 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
18244 release another day.</p>
18245
18246 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
18247 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18248
18249       </div>
18250       <div class="tags">
18251
18252
18253         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18254
18255
18256       </div>
18257     </div>
18258     <div class="padding"></div>
18259
18260     <div class="entry">
18261       <div class="title">
18262         <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>
18263       </div>
18264       <div class="date">
18265         18th July 2010
18266       </div>
18267       <div class="body">
18268         <p>Thanks to
18269 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
18270 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
18271 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
18272 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
18273 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
18274 only available from the development server, until more experience is
18275 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
18276
18277 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
18278 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
18279 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
18280 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
18281 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
18282 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
18283 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
18284
18285       </div>
18286       <div class="tags">
18287
18288
18289         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>.
18290
18291
18292       </div>
18293     </div>
18294     <div class="padding"></div>
18295
18296     <div class="entry">
18297       <div class="title">
18298         <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>
18299       </div>
18300       <div class="date">
18301         17th July 2010
18302       </div>
18303       <div class="body">
18304         <p>This is a
18305 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
18306 on my
18307 <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
18308 work</a> on
18309 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
18310 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
18311
18312 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
18313 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
18314 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
18315 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
18316
18317 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
18318 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
18319 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
18320
18321 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
18322
18323 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
18324 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
18325 the web.
18326
18327 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
18328 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
18329 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
18330 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
18331 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
18332 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
18333
18334 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
18335 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
18336 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
18337 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
18338 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
18339 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
18340 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
18341 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
18342 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
18343 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
18344 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
18345 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
18346 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
18347 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
18348 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
18349 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
18350
18351 <blockquote><pre>
18352 ldapsearch -h ldap \
18353   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
18354   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
18355   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
18356   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
18357   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
18358   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
18359
18360 ldapsearch -h ldap \
18361   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
18362   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
18363   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
18364   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
18365   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
18366 </pre></blockquote>
18367
18368 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
18369 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
18370 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
18371 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18372 also exist.</p>
18373
18374 <blockquote><pre>
18375 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18376 objectclass: top
18377 objectclass: dnsdomain
18378 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18379 dc: tjener
18380 arecord: 10.0.2.2
18381 associateddomain: tjener.intern
18382
18383 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18384 objectclass: top
18385 objectclass: dnsdomain2
18386 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18387 dc: 2
18388 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
18389 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
18390 </pre></blockquote>
18391
18392 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
18393 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
18394 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
18395 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
18396 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
18397 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
18398 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
18399 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
18400 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
18401 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
18402 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
18403 instead.</p>
18404
18405 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
18406 like this:</p>
18407
18408 <blockquote><pre>
18409 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
18410   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
18411   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
18412   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
18413   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
18414   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
18415
18416 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
18417   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
18418 </pre></blockquote>
18419
18420 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
18421 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
18422 reverse lookups.</p>
18423
18424 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
18425 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
18426 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
18427 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
18428
18429 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
18430 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
18431 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
18432
18433 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
18434 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
18435 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
18436 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
18437 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
18438
18439 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
18440 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
18441 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
18442 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
18443 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
18444
18445 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
18446 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
18447 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
18448 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
18449 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
18450 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
18451
18452 <blockquote><pre>
18453 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
18454     SUP top
18455     AUXILIARY
18456     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
18457           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
18458           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
18459           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
18460           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
18461     ))
18462 </pre></blockquote>
18463
18464 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
18465 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
18466 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
18467 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
18468 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
18469 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
18470
18471 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
18472
18473 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
18474 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
18475 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
18476 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
18477 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
18478
18479 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
18480 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
18481 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
18482 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
18483
18484 <blockquote><pre>
18485 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
18486 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
18487 </pre></blockquote>
18488
18489 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
18490 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
18491 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
18492 search result is this entry:</p>
18493
18494 <blockquote><pre>
18495 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18496 cn: dhcp
18497 objectClass: top
18498 objectClass: dhcpServer
18499 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18500 </pre></blockquote>
18501
18502 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
18503 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
18504 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
18505 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
18506 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
18507 The search result is this entry:</p>
18508
18509 <blockquote><pre>
18510 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18511 cn: DHCP Config
18512 objectClass: top
18513 objectClass: dhcpService
18514 objectClass: dhcpOptions
18515 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18516 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
18517 dhcpStatements: authoritative
18518 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
18519 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
18520 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
18521 </pre></blockquote>
18522
18523 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
18524 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
18525 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
18526 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
18527 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
18528 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
18529 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
18530 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
18531 related computer objects.</p>
18532
18533 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
18534 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
18535 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
18536 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
18537 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
18538 like:</p>
18539
18540 <blockquote><pre>
18541 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18542 cn: hostname
18543 objectClass: top
18544 objectClass: dhcpHost
18545 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18546 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
18547 </pre></blockquote>
18548
18549 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
18550 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
18551 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
18552 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
18553 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
18554 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
18555 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
18556 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
18557 structural object class.
18558
18559 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
18560
18561 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
18562 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
18563 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
18564 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
18565 in the configuration.</p>
18566
18567 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
18568 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
18569 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
18570 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
18571 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
18572 structure.</p>
18573
18574 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
18575 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
18576
18577 <blockquote><pre>
18578 ou=services
18579   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
18580     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
18581     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
18582       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
18583         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
18584     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
18585       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
18586         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
18587     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
18588       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
18589 </pre></blockquote>
18590
18591 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
18592 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
18593 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
18594 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
18595
18596 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
18597 like this:</p>
18598
18599 <blockquote><pre>
18600 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18601 dc: hostname
18602 objectClass: top
18603 objectClass: dhcpHost
18604 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18605 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
18606 associateddomain: hostname.intern
18607 arecord: 10.11.12.13
18608 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18609 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
18610 </pre></blockquote>
18611
18612 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
18613 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
18614 auxiliary object class.</p>
18615
18616       </div>
18617       <div class="tags">
18618
18619
18620         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>.
18621
18622
18623       </div>
18624     </div>
18625     <div class="padding"></div>
18626
18627     <div class="entry">
18628       <div class="title">
18629         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
18630       </div>
18631       <div class="date">
18632         14th July 2010
18633       </div>
18634       <div class="body">
18635         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
18636 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
18637 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
18638 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
18639 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
18640
18641 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
18642 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
18643
18644 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
18645 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
18646 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
18647 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
18648 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
18649 to a slave DNS server.</p>
18650
18651 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
18652 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
18653 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
18654 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
18655 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
18656 seem to work.</p>
18657
18658 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
18659 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
18660 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
18661 this:</p>
18662
18663 <blockquote><pre>
18664   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18665   cn: hostname
18666   objectClass: dhcphost
18667   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18668   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
18669   associateddomain: hostname.intern
18670   arecord: 10.11.12.13
18671   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18672   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
18673   ldapconfigsound: Y
18674 </pre></blockquote>
18675
18676 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
18677 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
18678 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
18679 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
18680
18681 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
18682 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
18683 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
18684 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
18685 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
18686 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
18687 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
18688 might be a good place to put it.</p>
18689
18690 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
18691 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18692
18693       </div>
18694       <div class="tags">
18695
18696
18697         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>.
18698
18699
18700       </div>
18701     </div>
18702     <div class="padding"></div>
18703
18704     <div class="entry">
18705       <div class="title">
18706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
18707       </div>
18708       <div class="date">
18709         11th July 2010
18710       </div>
18711       <div class="body">
18712         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
18713 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
18714 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
18715 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
18716
18717 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
18718 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
18719 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
18720 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
18721 LTSP clients.</p>
18722
18723 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
18724 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
18725 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
18726
18727 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
18728 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
18729 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
18730
18731 <blockquote><pre>
18732 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
18733 #
18734 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
18735 #
18736 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
18737 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
18738 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
18739 #
18740 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
18741 # existence of attribute names.
18742 #
18743 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
18744 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
18745 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
18746 #
18747 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
18748 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
18749 #
18750 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
18751 #     SUP top
18752 #     AUXILIARY
18753 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
18754
18755 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
18756 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
18757     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
18758     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
18759         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
18760         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
18761             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
18762             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
18763             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
18764             # bass value on to clients
18765             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
18766         done
18767     done
18768 fi
18769 </pre></blockquote>
18770
18771 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
18772 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
18773 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
18774 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
18775 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
18776
18777 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
18778 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18779
18780 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
18781 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
18782 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
18783 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
18784 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
18785 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
18786
18787       </div>
18788       <div class="tags">
18789
18790
18791         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>.
18792
18793
18794       </div>
18795     </div>
18796     <div class="padding"></div>
18797
18798     <div class="entry">
18799       <div class="title">
18800         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
18801       </div>
18802       <div class="date">
18803          9th July 2010
18804       </div>
18805       <div class="body">
18806         <p>Since
18807 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
18808 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
18809 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
18810 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
18811 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
18812 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
18813 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
18814 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
18815 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
18816 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
18817 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
18818 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
18819 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
18820
18821       </div>
18822       <div class="tags">
18823
18824
18825         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>.
18826
18827
18828       </div>
18829     </div>
18830     <div class="padding"></div>
18831
18832     <div class="entry">
18833       <div class="title">
18834         <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>
18835       </div>
18836       <div class="date">
18837          3rd July 2010
18838       </div>
18839       <div class="body">
18840         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
18841 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
18842 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
18843 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
18844 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
18845 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
18846 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
18847 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
18848
18849 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
18850 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
18851 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
18852 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
18853 publish the difference.</p>
18854
18855 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
18856
18857 <blockquote><p>
18858   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
18859   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
18860   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
18861   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
18862   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
18863   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
18864   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
18865   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
18866 </p></blockquote>
18867
18868 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
18869
18870 <blockquote><p>
18871   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
18872   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
18873   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
18874   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
18875   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
18876   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
18877   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
18878   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
18879   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
18880   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
18881   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
18882   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
18883   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
18884   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
18885   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
18886   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
18887   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
18888   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
18889   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
18890   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
18891 </p></blockquote>
18892
18893 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
18894
18895 <blockquote><p>
18896   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
18897   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
18898   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
18899   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
18900   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
18901   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
18902   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
18903   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
18904   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
18905   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
18906   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
18907   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
18908   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
18909   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
18910   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
18911   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
18912   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
18913   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
18914   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
18915   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
18916   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
18917 </p></blockquote>
18918
18919 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
18920
18921 <blockquote><p>
18922   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
18923   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
18924   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
18925 </p></blockquote>
18926
18927 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
18928 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
18929 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
18930 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
18931 the difference somewhat.
18932
18933       </div>
18934       <div class="tags">
18935
18936
18937         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>.
18938
18939
18940       </div>
18941     </div>
18942     <div class="padding"></div>
18943
18944     <div class="entry">
18945       <div class="title">
18946         <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>
18947       </div>
18948       <div class="date">
18949          1st July 2010
18950       </div>
18951       <div class="body">
18952         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
18953 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
18954 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
18955 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
18956 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
18957 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
18958 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
18959 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
18960 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
18961
18962 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
18963
18964 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
18965 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
18966 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
18967 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
18968 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
18969 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
18970 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
18971 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
18972 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
18973 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
18974 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
18975 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
18976 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
18977 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
18978 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
18979
18980 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
18981
18982 <blockquote><pre>
18983 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
18984 </pre></blockquote>
18985
18986 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
18987 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
18988 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
18989 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
18990 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
18991 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
18992 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
18993 on how to get this working.</p>
18994
18995 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
18996 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
18997 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
18998 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
18999 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
19000 instructions I found in the
19001 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
19002 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
19003
19004 <blockquote><pre>
19005         debug-level             0
19006         reload-count            unlimited
19007         paranoia                no
19008
19009         enable-cache            passwd          yes
19010         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
19011         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
19012         suggested-size          passwd          211
19013         check-files             passwd          yes
19014         persistent              passwd          yes
19015         shared                  passwd          yes
19016         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
19017         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
19018
19019         enable-cache            group           yes
19020         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
19021         negative-time-to-live   group           20
19022         suggested-size          group           211
19023         check-files             group           yes
19024         persistent              group           yes
19025         shared                  group           yes
19026         max-db-size             group           33554432
19027         auto-propagate          group           yes
19028
19029         enable-cache            hosts           no
19030         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
19031         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
19032         suggested-size          hosts           211
19033         check-files             hosts           yes
19034         persistent              hosts           yes
19035         shared                  hosts           yes
19036         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
19037
19038         enable-cache            services        yes
19039         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
19040         negative-time-to-live   services        20
19041         suggested-size          services        211
19042         check-files             services        yes
19043         persistent              services        yes
19044         shared                  services        yes
19045         max-db-size             services        33554432
19046 </pre></blockquote>
19047
19048 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
19049 automatically like the one provided in
19050 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
19051 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
19052 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
19053 look like this:</p>
19054
19055 <blockquote><pre>
19056 passwd:         files ldap
19057 group:          files ldap
19058 shadow:         files ldap
19059 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
19060 networks:       files
19061 protocols:      files
19062 services:       files
19063 ethers:         files
19064 rpc:            files
19065 netgroup:       files ldap
19066 </pre></blockquote>
19067
19068 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
19069 shadow and netgroup.</p>
19070
19071 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
19072 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
19073 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
19074 attributes cached.
19075
19076 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
19077   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19078
19079 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
19080 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
19081 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
19082 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
19083 discovered sssd.</p>
19084
19085 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
19086
19087 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
19088 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
19089 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
19090 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
19091 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
19092 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
19093 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
19094 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
19095 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
19096 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
19097 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
19098 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
19099 version 1.2 is now in testing.
19100
19101 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
19102 roaming setup I want</p>
19103
19104 <blockquote><pre>
19105 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
19106 </pre></blockquote>
19107
19108 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
19109 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
19110
19111 <blockquote><pre>
19112 [sssd]
19113 config_file_version = 2
19114 reconnection_retries = 3
19115 sbus_timeout = 30
19116 services = nss, pam
19117 domains = INTERN
19118
19119 [nss]
19120 filter_groups = root
19121 filter_users = root
19122 reconnection_retries = 3
19123
19124 [pam]
19125 reconnection_retries = 3
19126
19127 [domain/INTERN]
19128 enumerate = false
19129 cache_credentials = true
19130
19131 id_provider = ldap
19132 auth_provider = ldap
19133 chpass_provider = ldap
19134
19135 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
19136 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19137 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
19138 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
19139 </pre></blockquote>
19140
19141 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
19142 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
19143
19144 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
19145 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
19146 modify it manually.</p>
19147
19148 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19149 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19150
19151       </div>
19152       <div class="tags">
19153
19154
19155         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19156
19157
19158       </div>
19159     </div>
19160     <div class="padding"></div>
19161
19162     <div class="entry">
19163       <div class="title">
19164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19165       </div>
19166       <div class="date">
19167         28th June 2010
19168       </div>
19169       <div class="body">
19170         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
19171 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
19172 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
19173 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
19174 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
19175 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
19176 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
19177 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
19178 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
19179 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
19180
19181 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
19182 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
19183 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
19184 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
19185 released.</p>
19186
19187 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
19188 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
19189 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
19190 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
19191
19192 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
19193 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19194
19195 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
19196 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
19197 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
19198 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
19199 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
19200
19201       </div>
19202       <div class="tags">
19203
19204
19205         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>.
19206
19207
19208       </div>
19209     </div>
19210     <div class="padding"></div>
19211
19212     <div class="entry">
19213       <div class="title">
19214         <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>
19215       </div>
19216       <div class="date">
19217         24th June 2010
19218       </div>
19219       <div class="body">
19220         <p>A while back, I
19221 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
19222 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
19223 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
19224 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
19225
19226 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
19227 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
19228 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
19229 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
19230
19231 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
19232 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
19233 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
19234 Debian Edu.</p>
19235
19236 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
19237 the
19238 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
19239 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
19240 available today from IETF.</p>
19241
19242 <pre>
19243 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
19244 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
19245 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
19246  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
19247         NAME 'dhcpHost'
19248         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
19249 -       SUP top
19250 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
19251         MUST cn
19252         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
19253         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
19254 </pre>
19255
19256 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
19257 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
19258 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
19259
19260 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19261 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19262
19263       </div>
19264       <div class="tags">
19265
19266
19267         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>.
19268
19269
19270       </div>
19271     </div>
19272     <div class="padding"></div>
19273
19274     <div class="entry">
19275       <div class="title">
19276         <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>
19277       </div>
19278       <div class="date">
19279         16th June 2010
19280       </div>
19281       <div class="body">
19282         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
19283 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
19284 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
19285 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
19286 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
19287 this:
19288
19289 <blockquote><pre>
19290 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19291 tasksel --new-install
19292 </pre></blockquote>
19293
19294 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
19295 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
19296 any output what so ever.
19297
19298 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
19299 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
19300 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
19301 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
19302 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
19303 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
19304 code like this:
19305
19306 <blockquote><pre>
19307 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19308 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
19309 $cmd
19310 </pre></blockquote>
19311
19312 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
19313 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
19314 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
19315 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
19316 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
19317 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
19318 installation.</p>
19319
19320 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
19321 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
19322 like this.</p>
19323
19324       </div>
19325       <div class="tags">
19326
19327
19328         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
19329
19330
19331       </div>
19332     </div>
19333     <div class="padding"></div>
19334
19335     <div class="entry">
19336       <div class="title">
19337         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
19338       </div>
19339       <div class="date">
19340         13th June 2010
19341       </div>
19342       <div class="body">
19343         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
19344 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
19345 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
19346 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
19347 pages.</p>
19348
19349 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
19350 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
19351 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
19352 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
19353 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
19354 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
19355 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
19356 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
19357 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
19358 see how the project is doing.</p>
19359
19360 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
19361 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
19362 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
19363 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
19364 Windows.  This is great.</p>
19365
19366       </div>
19367       <div class="tags">
19368
19369
19370         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>.
19371
19372
19373       </div>
19374     </div>
19375     <div class="padding"></div>
19376
19377     <div class="entry">
19378       <div class="title">
19379         <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>
19380       </div>
19381       <div class="date">
19382         13th June 2010
19383       </div>
19384       <div class="body">
19385         <p>My
19386 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
19387 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
19388 finally made the upgrade logs available from
19389 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
19390 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
19391 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
19392 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
19393
19394 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
19395 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
19396 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
19397 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
19398 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
19399 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
19400 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
19401 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
19402
19403 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
19404 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
19405 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
19406 too surprising.</p>
19407
19408 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
19409 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
19410 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
19411 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
19412 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
19413 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
19414 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
19415 continue.</p>
19416
19417 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
19418 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
19419   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
19420   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
19421   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
19422   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
19423   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
19424   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19425   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19426   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
19427   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
19428   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
19429   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
19430   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19431   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19432   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19433   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19434   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19435   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
19436   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
19437   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
19438   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
19439   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
19440   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
19441   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
19442   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
19443   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
19444   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
19445   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
19446   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
19447
19448 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
19449
19450 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
19451   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
19452   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
19453   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
19454   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
19455   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
19456   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
19457   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
19458   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
19459   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
19460   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19461   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
19462   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
19463   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
19464   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
19465   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
19466   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
19467   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
19468   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
19469   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
19470   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
19471   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
19472   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
19473   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
19474   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
19475   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
19476   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
19477   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
19478   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
19479   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19480   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
19481   zip</p>
19482
19483 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
19484
19485 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
19486   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
19487   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
19488   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
19489   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
19490   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
19491   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19492   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19493   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
19494   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
19495   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
19496   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
19497   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19498   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19499   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19500   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19501   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19502   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
19503   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
19504   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
19505   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
19506   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
19507   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
19508   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
19509   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
19510   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
19511   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
19512   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
19513
19514 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
19515 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
19516   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
19517   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
19518   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
19519   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
19520   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
19521   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
19522   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
19523   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
19524   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
19525   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
19526   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
19527   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
19528   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
19529   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
19530   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
19531   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
19532   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
19533   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
19534   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
19535   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
19536   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
19537   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
19538   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
19539   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
19540   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
19541   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
19542   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
19543   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
19544   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
19545   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
19546   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
19547   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
19548   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
19549   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19550   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
19551   xulrunner-1.9</p>
19552
19553
19554       </div>
19555       <div class="tags">
19556
19557
19558         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>.
19559
19560
19561       </div>
19562     </div>
19563     <div class="padding"></div>
19564
19565     <div class="entry">
19566       <div class="title">
19567         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
19568       </div>
19569       <div class="date">
19570         11th June 2010
19571       </div>
19572       <div class="body">
19573         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
19574 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
19575 have been discovered and reported in the process
19576 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
19577 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
19578 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
19579 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
19580 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
19581
19582 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
19583 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
19584 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
19585 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
19586 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
19587 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
19588
19589 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
19590 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
19591 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
19592 is created.  The bug report
19593 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
19594 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
19595 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
19596 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
19597 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
19598 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
19599 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
19600 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
19601 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
19602 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
19603 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
19604 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
19605 Debian Squeeze.</p>
19606
19607 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
19608 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
19609 trick:</p>
19610
19611 <blockquote><pre>
19612 #!/bin/sh
19613 set -ex
19614
19615 if [ "$1" ] ; then
19616     desktop=$1
19617 else
19618     desktop=gnome
19619 fi
19620
19621 from=lenny
19622 to=squeeze
19623
19624 exec &lt; /dev/null
19625 unset LANG
19626 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
19627 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
19628 fuser -mv .
19629 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
19630 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
19631 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
19632 #!/bin/sh
19633 exit 101
19634 EOF
19635 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
19636 exit_cleanup() {
19637     umount $tmpdir/proc
19638 }
19639 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
19640 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
19641 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
19642
19643 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
19644
19645 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
19646 # to return the correct answers.
19647 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
19648     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
19649
19650 # Include the desktop and laptop task
19651 for test in desktop laptop ; do
19652     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
19653 #!/bin/sh
19654 exit 2
19655 EOF
19656     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
19657 done
19658
19659 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19660 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
19661 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
19662 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
19663
19664 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
19665 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
19666 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
19667 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
19668 fuser -mv
19669 </pre></blockquote>
19670
19671 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
19672 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
19673 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
19674 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
19675 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
19676 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
19677
19678 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
19679 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
19680 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
19681 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
19682 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
19683 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
19684 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
19685
19686 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
19687 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
19688 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
19689 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
19690 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
19691 packages.</p>
19692
19693       </div>
19694       <div class="tags">
19695
19696
19697         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>.
19698
19699
19700       </div>
19701     </div>
19702     <div class="padding"></div>
19703
19704     <div class="entry">
19705       <div class="title">
19706         <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>
19707       </div>
19708       <div class="date">
19709          6th June 2010
19710       </div>
19711       <div class="body">
19712         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
19713 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
19714 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
19715 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
19716 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
19717 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
19718 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
19719
19720 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
19721 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
19722 COLUMNS):</p>
19723
19724 <blockquote><pre>
19725 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
19726 previous=N
19727 PREVLEVEL=
19728 RUNLEVEL=
19729 runlevel=S
19730 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
19731 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
19732 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
19733 </pre></blockquote>
19734
19735 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
19736 script.</p>
19737
19738 <blockquote><pre>
19739 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
19740 previous=N
19741 PREVLEVEL=N
19742 RUNLEVEL=S
19743 runlevel=S
19744 </pre></blockquote>
19745
19746 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
19747 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
19748 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
19749
19750 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
19751 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
19752 choice.</p>
19753
19754       </div>
19755       <div class="tags">
19756
19757
19758         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>.
19759
19760
19761       </div>
19762     </div>
19763     <div class="padding"></div>
19764
19765     <div class="entry">
19766       <div class="title">
19767         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
19768       </div>
19769       <div class="date">
19770          6th June 2010
19771       </div>
19772       <div class="body">
19773         <p>Via the
19774 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
19775 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
19776 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
19777 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
19778 following the standards wars of today.</p>
19779
19780       </div>
19781       <div class="tags">
19782
19783
19784         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>.
19785
19786
19787       </div>
19788     </div>
19789     <div class="padding"></div>
19790
19791     <div class="entry">
19792       <div class="title">
19793         <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>
19794       </div>
19795       <div class="date">
19796          3rd June 2010
19797       </div>
19798       <div class="body">
19799         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
19800 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
19801 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
19802 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
19803 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
19804
19805 <blockquote><pre>
19806 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
19807   vendor                    count
19808   Dell Computer Corporation     1
19809     PowerEdge 1750              1
19810   IBM                           1
19811     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
19812   Intel                         2
19813   [no-dmi-info]                 3
19814 maintainer:~#
19815 </pre></blockquote>
19816
19817 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
19818 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
19819 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
19820 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
19821 option to list the individual machines.</p>
19822
19823 <p>A larger list is
19824 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
19825 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
19826 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
19827 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
19828 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
19829 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
19830 collector.</p>
19831
19832       </div>
19833       <div class="tags">
19834
19835
19836         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>.
19837
19838
19839       </div>
19840     </div>
19841     <div class="padding"></div>
19842
19843     <div class="entry">
19844       <div class="title">
19845         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
19846       </div>
19847       <div class="date">
19848          1st June 2010
19849       </div>
19850       <div class="body">
19851         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
19852 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
19853 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
19854 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
19855 wait.</p>
19856
19857 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
19858 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
19859 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
19860 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
19861 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
19862 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
19863
19864 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
19865 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
19866 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
19867 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
19868 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
19869 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
19870 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
19871 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
19872
19873 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
19874
19875       </div>
19876       <div class="tags">
19877
19878
19879         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>.
19880
19881
19882       </div>
19883     </div>
19884     <div class="padding"></div>
19885
19886     <div class="entry">
19887       <div class="title">
19888         <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>
19889       </div>
19890       <div class="date">
19891         27th May 2010
19892       </div>
19893       <div class="body">
19894         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
19895 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
19896 issues are known and should be solved:
19897
19898 <p><ul>
19899
19900 <li>The wicd package seen to
19901 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
19902 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
19903 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
19904 seem to be on the case.</li>
19905
19906 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
19907 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
19908 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
19909 maintainer is on the case.</li>
19910
19911 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
19912 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
19913 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
19914 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
19915 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
19916 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
19917 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
19918 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
19919
19920 </ul></p>
19921
19922 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
19923 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
19924 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
19925 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
19926
19927 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
19928 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
19929 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
19930 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
19931
19932 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
19933
19934       </div>
19935       <div class="tags">
19936
19937
19938         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>.
19939
19940
19941       </div>
19942     </div>
19943     <div class="padding"></div>
19944
19945     <div class="entry">
19946       <div class="title">
19947         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
19948       </div>
19949       <div class="date">
19950         22nd May 2010
19951       </div>
19952       <div class="body">
19953         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
19954 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
19955 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
19956 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
19957
19958 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
19959 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
19960 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
19961 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
19962 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
19963 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
19964 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
19965 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
19966 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
19967 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
19968 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
19969 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
19970 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
19971 going to work.</p>
19972
19973 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
19974 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
19975 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
19976 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
19977 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
19978 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
19979 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
19980 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
19981 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
19982 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
19983 Edu.</p>
19984
19985 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
19986 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
19987 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
19988 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
19989 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
19990 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
19991
19992 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
19993 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
19994
19995       </div>
19996       <div class="tags">
19997
19998
19999         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>.
20000
20001
20002       </div>
20003     </div>
20004     <div class="padding"></div>
20005
20006     <div class="entry">
20007       <div class="title">
20008         <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>
20009       </div>
20010       <div class="date">
20011         19th May 2010
20012       </div>
20013       <div class="body">
20014         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
20015 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
20016 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
20017 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
20018 into unstable.  The
20019 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
20020 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
20021 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
20022 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
20023 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20024 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
20025 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
20026
20027 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
20028 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
20029 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
20030 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
20031 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
20032 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
20033 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
20034 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
20035
20036 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
20037 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
20038 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
20039 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
20040 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
20041 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
20042 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
20043
20044 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
20045 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
20046 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
20047 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
20048 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
20049 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
20050 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
20051 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
20052 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
20053 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
20054 on the home directory servers.</p>
20055
20056 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
20057 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
20058 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
20059 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
20060 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
20061 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
20062
20063 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20064 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20065
20066       </div>
20067       <div class="tags">
20068
20069
20070         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20071
20072
20073       </div>
20074     </div>
20075     <div class="padding"></div>
20076
20077     <div class="entry">
20078       <div class="title">
20079         <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>
20080       </div>
20081       <div class="date">
20082         14th May 2010
20083       </div>
20084       <div class="body">
20085         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
20086 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
20087 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
20088 expected, if I am to believe the
20089 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
20090 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
20091 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
20092 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
20093 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
20094 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
20095 version.</p>
20096
20097 More information about
20098 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20099 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
20100 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
20101 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
20102
20103 <blockquote><pre>
20104 CONCURRENCY=none
20105 </pre></blockquote>
20106
20107 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20108 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20109 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20110 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20111
20112       </div>
20113       <div class="tags">
20114
20115
20116         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>.
20117
20118
20119       </div>
20120     </div>
20121     <div class="padding"></div>
20122
20123     <div class="entry">
20124       <div class="title">
20125         <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>
20126       </div>
20127       <div class="date">
20128         14th May 2010
20129       </div>
20130       <div class="body">
20131         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
20132 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
20133 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
20134 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
20135 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
20136 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
20137 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
20138 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
20139
20140 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
20141 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
20142 this on the collector host:</p>
20143
20144 <blockquote><pre>
20145 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
20146 </pre></blockquote>
20147
20148 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
20149 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
20150
20151 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
20152 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
20153 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
20154 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
20155 written yet.</p>
20156
20157       </div>
20158       <div class="tags">
20159
20160
20161         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>.
20162
20163
20164       </div>
20165     </div>
20166     <div class="padding"></div>
20167
20168     <div class="entry">
20169       <div class="title">
20170         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
20171       </div>
20172       <div class="date">
20173         13th May 2010
20174       </div>
20175       <div class="body">
20176         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
20177 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
20178 has been
20179 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
20180
20181 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
20182 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
20183 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
20184 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
20185 based boot system.  Tollef is
20186 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
20187 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
20188 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
20189 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
20190 at the moment do not.</p>
20191
20192 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
20193 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
20194 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
20195 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
20196 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
20197 way forward.</p>
20198
20199 <p>In the mean time, based on the
20200 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
20201 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
20202 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
20203 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
20204 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
20205 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
20206 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
20207 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
20208
20209       </div>
20210       <div class="tags">
20211
20212
20213         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>.
20214
20215
20216       </div>
20217     </div>
20218     <div class="padding"></div>
20219
20220     <div class="entry">
20221       <div class="title">
20222         <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>
20223       </div>
20224       <div class="date">
20225          6th May 2010
20226       </div>
20227       <div class="body">
20228         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
20229 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
20230 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
20231 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
20232 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20233 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
20234 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
20235
20236 <blockquote><pre>
20237 CONCURRENCY=makefile
20238 </pre></blockquote>
20239
20240 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
20241 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
20242 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
20243 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
20244 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
20245 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
20246 make this happen.</p>
20247
20248 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
20249 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
20250 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
20251 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
20252 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
20253
20254 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
20255 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
20256 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
20257 fix the remaining issues.</p>
20258
20259 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20260 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20261 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20262 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20263
20264       </div>
20265       <div class="tags">
20266
20267
20268         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>.
20269
20270
20271       </div>
20272     </div>
20273     <div class="padding"></div>
20274
20275     <div class="entry">
20276       <div class="title">
20277         <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>
20278       </div>
20279       <div class="date">
20280          2nd May 2010
20281       </div>
20282       <div class="body">
20283         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
20284 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
20285 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
20286
20287 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
20288 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
20289 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
20290 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
20291 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
20292
20293 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
20294 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
20295
20296 <blockquote><pre>
20297 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
20298 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
20299 Password expires                                        : never
20300 Password inactive                                       : never
20301 Account expires                                         : never
20302 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
20303 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
20304 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
20305 root@tjener:~#
20306 </pre></blockquote>
20307
20308 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
20309 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
20310 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
20311 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
20312 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
20313 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
20314
20315 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
20316 intended:</p>
20317
20318 <blockquote><pre>
20319 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
20320 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
20321 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
20322 Password expires                                        : never
20323 Password inactive                                       : never
20324 Account expires                                         : never
20325 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
20326 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
20327 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
20328 root@tjener:~#
20329 </pre></blockquote>
20330
20331 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
20332 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
20333 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
20334
20335 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
20336 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
20337
20338 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
20339 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20340
20341 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
20342 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
20343 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
20344 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
20345 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
20346 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
20347 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
20348
20349 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
20350 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
20351 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
20352 change.</p>
20353
20354       </div>
20355       <div class="tags">
20356
20357
20358         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20359
20360
20361       </div>
20362     </div>
20363     <div class="padding"></div>
20364
20365     <div class="entry">
20366       <div class="title">
20367         <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>
20368       </div>
20369       <div class="date">
20370         28th April 2010
20371       </div>
20372       <div class="body">
20373         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
20374 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
20375 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
20376 and go.</p>
20377
20378 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
20379 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
20380 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
20381 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
20382
20383 <ul>
20384
20385  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
20386    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
20387    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
20388    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
20389    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
20390    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
20391    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
20392    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
20393    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
20394    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
20395    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
20396    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
20397
20398  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
20399    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
20400    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
20401    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
20402    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20403    or the Fedora developed
20404    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
20405    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
20406
20407  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
20408    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
20409    directory, using unison.</li>
20410
20411  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
20412    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
20413    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
20414    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
20415    implemented.</li>
20416
20417  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
20418    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
20419
20420  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
20421    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
20422    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
20423
20424 </ul>
20425
20426 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
20427 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
20428 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
20429 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
20430 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
20431 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
20432 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
20433 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
20434 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
20435
20436 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20437 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20438
20439       </div>
20440       <div class="tags">
20441
20442
20443         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20444
20445
20446       </div>
20447     </div>
20448     <div class="padding"></div>
20449
20450     <div class="entry">
20451       <div class="title">
20452         <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>
20453       </div>
20454       <div class="date">
20455         19th April 2010
20456       </div>
20457       <div class="body">
20458         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
20459 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
20460 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
20461 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
20462 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
20463 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
20464 restrictions on the web, for example from
20465 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
20466 epub-version from
20467 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
20468 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
20469 strongly recommend this book.</p>
20470
20471       </div>
20472       <div class="tags">
20473
20474
20475         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>.
20476
20477
20478       </div>
20479     </div>
20480     <div class="padding"></div>
20481
20482     <div class="entry">
20483       <div class="title">
20484         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
20485       </div>
20486       <div class="date">
20487         14th April 2010
20488       </div>
20489       <div class="body">
20490         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
20491 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
20492 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
20493 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
20494 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
20495 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
20496 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
20497 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
20498 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
20499
20500 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
20501 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
20502 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
20503 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
20504 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
20505
20506 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
20507 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
20508
20509 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
20510 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
20511 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
20512 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
20513 to work properly.</p>
20514
20515 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
20516 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
20517 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
20518 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
20519 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
20520 time.</p>
20521
20522 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
20523 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
20524 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
20525 up in a few days.</p>
20526
20527       </div>
20528       <div class="tags">
20529
20530
20531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20532
20533
20534       </div>
20535     </div>
20536     <div class="padding"></div>
20537
20538     <div class="entry">
20539       <div class="title">
20540         <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>
20541       </div>
20542       <div class="date">
20543          6th March 2010
20544       </div>
20545       <div class="body">
20546         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
20547 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
20548 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
20549 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
20550 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
20551 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
20552
20553 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
20554 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
20555 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
20556 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
20557
20558 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
20559 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
20560 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
20561 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
20562 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
20563 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
20564
20565       </div>
20566       <div class="tags">
20567
20568
20569         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20570
20571
20572       </div>
20573     </div>
20574     <div class="padding"></div>
20575
20576     <div class="entry">
20577       <div class="title">
20578         <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>
20579       </div>
20580       <div class="date">
20581         11th February 2010
20582       </div>
20583       <div class="body">
20584         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
20585 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
20586 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
20587 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
20588 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
20589 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
20590 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
20591
20592 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
20593
20594 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
20595 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
20596 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
20597 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
20598
20599       </div>
20600       <div class="tags">
20601
20602
20603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20604
20605
20606       </div>
20607     </div>
20608     <div class="padding"></div>
20609
20610     <div class="entry">
20611       <div class="title">
20612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
20613       </div>
20614       <div class="date">
20615         27th January 2010
20616       </div>
20617       <div class="body">
20618         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
20619 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
20620 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
20621 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
20622 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
20623 further.</p>
20624
20625 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
20626 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
20627 configured to be a server for the
20628 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
20629 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
20630 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
20631 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
20632 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
20633 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
20634 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
20635 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
20636 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
20637 and Nagios configuration.</p>
20638
20639 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
20640 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
20641 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
20642 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
20643
20644 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
20645 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
20646 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
20647 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
20648 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
20649 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
20650 the machine.</p>
20651
20652 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
20653 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
20654 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
20655 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
20656
20657 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
20658 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
20659 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
20660 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
20661 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
20662 everything is taken care of.</p>
20663
20664       </div>
20665       <div class="tags">
20666
20667
20668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20669
20670
20671       </div>
20672     </div>
20673     <div class="padding"></div>
20674
20675     <div class="entry">
20676       <div class="title">
20677         <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>
20678       </div>
20679       <div class="date">
20680         12th August 2009
20681       </div>
20682       <div class="body">
20683         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
20684 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
20685 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
20686 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
20687
20688 <table>
20689 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20690 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
20691 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
20692 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
20693 </table>
20694
20695 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
20696 got these numbers:</p>
20697
20698 <table>
20699 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20700 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
20701 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
20702 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
20703 </table>
20704
20705 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
20706
20707 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
20708 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
20709 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
20710 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
20711 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
20712
20713
20714 <table>
20715 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20716 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
20717 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
20718 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
20719 </table>
20720
20721 <p>And with 'site:no':
20722
20723 <table>
20724 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20725 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
20726 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
20727 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
20728 </table>
20729
20730 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
20731 numbers.</p>
20732
20733       </div>
20734       <div class="tags">
20735
20736
20737         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>.
20738
20739
20740       </div>
20741     </div>
20742     <div class="padding"></div>
20743
20744     <div class="entry">
20745       <div class="title">
20746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
20747       </div>
20748       <div class="date">
20749          8th August 2009
20750       </div>
20751       <div class="body">
20752         <p>According to <a
20753 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
20754 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
20755 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
20756 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
20757 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
20758 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
20759 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
20760 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
20761 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
20762 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
20763
20764 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
20765 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
20766 seminar this autumn.</p>
20767
20768       </div>
20769       <div class="tags">
20770
20771
20772         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>.
20773
20774
20775       </div>
20776     </div>
20777     <div class="padding"></div>
20778
20779     <div class="entry">
20780       <div class="title">
20781         <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>
20782       </div>
20783       <div class="date">
20784         27th July 2009
20785       </div>
20786       <div class="body">
20787         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
20788 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
20789 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
20790 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
20791 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
20792 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
20793 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
20794
20795 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
20796 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
20797 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
20798
20799       </div>
20800       <div class="tags">
20801
20802
20803         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>.
20804
20805
20806       </div>
20807     </div>
20808     <div class="padding"></div>
20809
20810     <div class="entry">
20811       <div class="title">
20812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
20813       </div>
20814       <div class="date">
20815         22nd July 2009
20816       </div>
20817       <div class="body">
20818         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
20819 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
20820 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
20821 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
20822 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
20823 the package up to date.</p>
20824
20825 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
20826 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
20827 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
20828 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
20829 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
20830 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
20831 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
20832 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
20833 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
20834 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
20835 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
20836 working on the future release.</p>
20837
20838 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
20839 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
20840
20841       </div>
20842       <div class="tags">
20843
20844
20845         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>.
20846
20847
20848       </div>
20849     </div>
20850     <div class="padding"></div>
20851
20852     <div class="entry">
20853       <div class="title">
20854         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
20855       </div>
20856       <div class="date">
20857         24th June 2009
20858       </div>
20859       <div class="body">
20860         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
20861 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
20862 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
20863 funded
20864 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
20865 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
20866 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
20867 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
20868 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
20869 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
20870
20871 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
20872 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
20873 boot:</p>
20874
20875 <ul>
20876
20877 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
20878
20879 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
20880    clock is in UTC.</li>
20881
20882 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
20883    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20884    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
20885
20886 </ul>
20887
20888 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
20889 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
20890 Villegas</a>.
20891
20892 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
20893 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
20894 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
20895 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
20896 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
20897 using this.</p>
20898
20899 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
20900 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
20901 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
20902 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
20903 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
20904 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
20905 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
20906
20907       </div>
20908       <div class="tags">
20909
20910
20911         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>.
20912
20913
20914       </div>
20915     </div>
20916     <div class="padding"></div>
20917
20918     <div class="entry">
20919       <div class="title">
20920         <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>
20921       </div>
20922       <div class="date">
20923          2nd May 2009
20924       </div>
20925       <div class="body">
20926         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
20927 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
20928 do not yet know them.</p>
20929
20930 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
20931 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
20932 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
20933 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
20934 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
20935 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
20936 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
20937 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
20938 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
20939 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
20940 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
20941
20942 <p>The second one is
20943 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
20944 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
20945 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
20946 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
20947 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
20948 and the company behind it is running
20949 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
20950 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
20951 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
20952 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
20953 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
20954 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
20955 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
20956 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
20957
20958 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
20959 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
20960 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
20961 surrounded by today.</p>
20962
20963       </div>
20964       <div class="tags">
20965
20966
20967         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20968
20969
20970       </div>
20971     </div>
20972     <div class="padding"></div>
20973
20974     <div class="entry">
20975       <div class="title">
20976         <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>
20977       </div>
20978       <div class="date">
20979         28th April 2009
20980       </div>
20981       <div class="body">
20982         <p>Julien Blache
20983 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
20984 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
20985 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
20986 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
20987 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
20988 properties.</p>
20989
20990       </div>
20991       <div class="tags">
20992
20993
20994         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
20995
20996
20997       </div>
20998     </div>
20999     <div class="padding"></div>
21000
21001     <div class="entry">
21002       <div class="title">
21003         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
21004       </div>
21005       <div class="date">
21006          5th April 2009
21007       </div>
21008       <div class="body">
21009         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
21010 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
21011 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
21012 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
21013 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
21014 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
21015 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
21016 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
21017
21018 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
21019 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
21020 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
21021   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21022   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
21023
21024 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
21025 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
21026 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
21027 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
21028
21029 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
21030 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
21031 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
21032 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
21033
21034 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
21035 set -e
21036 URL="$1"
21037 SAVEFILE="$2"
21038 DURATION="$3"
21039 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
21040   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21041   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
21042 pid=$!
21043 sleep $DURATION
21044 kill $pid
21045 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
21046
21047       </div>
21048       <div class="tags">
21049
21050
21051         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>.
21052
21053
21054       </div>
21055     </div>
21056     <div class="padding"></div>
21057
21058     <div class="entry">
21059       <div class="title">
21060         <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>
21061       </div>
21062       <div class="date">
21063         30th March 2009
21064       </div>
21065       <div class="body">
21066         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
21067 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
21068 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
21069 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
21070 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
21071 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
21072 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
21073 application.</p>
21074
21075 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
21076 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
21077 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
21078 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
21079 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
21080 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
21081 blocked from doing so.</p>
21082
21083 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
21084 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
21085 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
21086 requirements change.</p>
21087
21088 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
21089 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
21090 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
21091
21092       </div>
21093       <div class="tags">
21094
21095
21096         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
21097
21098
21099       </div>
21100     </div>
21101     <div class="padding"></div>
21102
21103     <div class="entry">
21104       <div class="title">
21105         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
21106       </div>
21107       <div class="date">
21108         29th March 2009
21109       </div>
21110       <div class="body">
21111         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
21112 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
21113 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
21114 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
21115 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
21116 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
21117 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
21118 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
21119 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
21120 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
21121 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
21122 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
21123 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
21124 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
21125 now. :)</p>
21126
21127       </div>
21128       <div class="tags">
21129
21130
21131         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>.
21132
21133
21134       </div>
21135     </div>
21136     <div class="padding"></div>
21137
21138     <div class="entry">
21139       <div class="title">
21140         <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>
21141       </div>
21142       <div class="date">
21143         29th March 2009
21144       </div>
21145       <div class="body">
21146         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
21147 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
21148 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
21149 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
21150 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
21151 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
21152
21153 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
21154 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
21155 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
21156 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
21157 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
21158 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
21159 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
21160 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
21161 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
21162 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
21163 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
21164 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
21165 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
21166
21167 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
21168 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
21169 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
21170 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
21171
21172 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
21173 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
21174
21175 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
21176 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
21177 new IETF work group?</p>
21178
21179       </div>
21180       <div class="tags">
21181
21182
21183         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>.
21184
21185
21186       </div>
21187     </div>
21188     <div class="padding"></div>
21189
21190     <div class="entry">
21191       <div class="title">
21192         <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>
21193       </div>
21194       <div class="date">
21195         28th February 2009
21196       </div>
21197       <div class="body">
21198         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
21199 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
21200 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
21201 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
21202 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
21203 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
21204 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
21205 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
21206 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
21207 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
21208 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
21209 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
21210 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
21211 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
21212 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
21213 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
21214 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
21215 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
21216 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
21217 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
21218 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
21219 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
21220 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
21221 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
21222 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
21223 machine.</p>
21224
21225 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
21226 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
21227 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
21228 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
21229 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
21230 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
21231 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
21232
21233 <pre>
21234 use LWP::Simple;
21235 use POSIX;
21236 use WWW::Mechanize;
21237 use Date::Parse;
21238 [...]
21239 sub get_support_info {
21240     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
21241     my $str;
21242
21243     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
21244         # fetch website from Dell support
21245         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";
21246         my $webpage = get($url);
21247         return undef unless ($webpage);
21248
21249         my $daysleft = -1;
21250         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
21251         foreach my $line (@lines) {
21252             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
21253             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21254             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
21255
21256             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
21257             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
21258             my $lastend = "";
21259             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
21260                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
21261
21262                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21263                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
21264                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21265                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
21266                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
21267                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
21268                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
21269             }
21270             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21271             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21272                 if ($lastend lt $today);
21273         }
21274     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
21275         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
21276         my $url =
21277             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
21278         $mech->get($url);
21279         my $fields = {
21280             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
21281             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
21282             'country' => 'NO',
21283             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
21284             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
21285         };
21286         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
21287                             fields      => $fields );
21288         # Next step is screen scraping
21289         my $content = $mech->content();
21290
21291         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21292         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
21293         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
21294         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
21295
21296         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21297
21298         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
21299             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
21300                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
21301             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
21302             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21303                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
21304             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21305                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
21306
21307             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
21308
21309             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21310                 if ($end lt $today);
21311         }
21312     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
21313         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
21314         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
21315         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
21316             my $content =
21317                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
21318             if ($content) {
21319                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21320                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
21321                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
21322                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
21323
21324                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
21325                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
21326
21327                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
21328
21329                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21330                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21331                     if ($end lt $today);
21332             }
21333         }
21334     }
21335     return $str;
21336 }
21337 </pre>
21338
21339 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
21340 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
21341 from dmidecode.</p>
21342
21343 <pre>
21344 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
21345                        "447707-B21");
21346 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
21347 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
21348                        "1234567");
21349 </pre>
21350
21351 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
21352 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
21353
21354 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
21355 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
21356 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
21357 do so.</p>
21358
21359       </div>
21360       <div class="tags">
21361
21362
21363         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>.
21364
21365
21366       </div>
21367     </div>
21368     <div class="padding"></div>
21369
21370     <div class="entry">
21371       <div class="title">
21372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
21373       </div>
21374       <div class="date">
21375         20th February 2009
21376       </div>
21377       <div class="body">
21378         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
21379 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
21380 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
21381 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
21382 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
21383 the "missing" computer.</p>
21384
21385 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
21386 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
21387 code blocks as defined in the
21388 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
21389 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
21390 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
21391 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
21392 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
21393 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
21394 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
21395 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
21396 codes.</p>
21397
21398 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
21399 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
21400 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
21401 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
21402 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
21403 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
21404
21405 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
21406 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
21407 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
21408 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
21409 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
21410 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
21411 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
21412 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
21413 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
21414 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
21415
21416 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
21417 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
21418 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
21419
21420       </div>
21421       <div class="tags">
21422
21423
21424         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>.
21425
21426
21427       </div>
21428     </div>
21429     <div class="padding"></div>
21430
21431     <div class="entry">
21432       <div class="title">
21433         <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>
21434       </div>
21435       <div class="date">
21436         17th January 2009
21437       </div>
21438       <div class="body">
21439         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
21440 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
21441 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
21442 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
21443 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
21444 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
21445 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
21446 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
21447 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
21448 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
21449 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
21450 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
21451 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
21452 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
21453
21454 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
21455 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
21456 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
21457 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
21458 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
21459 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
21460 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
21461 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
21462 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
21463 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
21464 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
21465 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
21466 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
21467 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
21468 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
21469 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
21470 playing when the download is done.</p>
21471
21472 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
21473 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
21474 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
21475 too.</p>
21476
21477 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
21478 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
21479 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
21480 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
21481
21482       </div>
21483       <div class="tags">
21484
21485
21486         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>.
21487
21488
21489       </div>
21490     </div>
21491     <div class="padding"></div>
21492
21493     <div class="entry">
21494       <div class="title">
21495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
21496       </div>
21497       <div class="date">
21498         28th December 2008
21499       </div>
21500       <div class="body">
21501         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
21502 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
21503 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
21504 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
21505 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
21506 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
21507 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
21508 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
21509 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
21510 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
21511 source, sink and mixer applications and
21512 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
21513 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
21514 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
21515 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
21516 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
21517 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
21518 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
21519 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
21520 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
21521
21522 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
21523 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
21524 larger stick as well.</p>
21525
21526       </div>
21527       <div class="tags">
21528
21529
21530         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>.
21531
21532
21533       </div>
21534     </div>
21535     <div class="padding"></div>
21536
21537     <div class="entry">
21538       <div class="title">
21539         <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>
21540       </div>
21541       <div class="date">
21542          7th December 2008
21543       </div>
21544       <div class="body">
21545         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
21546 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
21547 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
21548 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
21549 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
21550 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
21551 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
21552 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
21553
21554 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
21555 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
21556 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
21557 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
21558 of these cards.</p>
21559
21560       </div>
21561       <div class="tags">
21562
21563
21564         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>.
21565
21566
21567       </div>
21568     </div>
21569     <div class="padding"></div>
21570
21571     <div class="entry">
21572       <div class="title">
21573         <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>
21574       </div>
21575       <div class="date">
21576         25th November 2008
21577       </div>
21578       <div class="body">
21579         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
21580 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
21581 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
21582 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
21583 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
21584 notes are available on
21585 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
21586 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
21587 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
21588 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
21589 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
21590 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
21591 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
21592 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
21593 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
21594
21595 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
21596 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
21597
21598       </div>
21599       <div class="tags">
21600
21601
21602         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>.
21603
21604
21605       </div>
21606     </div>
21607     <div class="padding"></div>
21608
21609     <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>
21610     <div id="sidebar">
21611
21612
21613
21614 <h2>Archive</h2>
21615 <ul>
21616
21617 <li>2014
21618 <ul>
21619
21620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
21621
21622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
21623
21624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
21625
21626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
21627
21628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
21629
21630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
21631
21632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
21633
21634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
21635
21636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
21637
21638 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
21639
21640 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
21641
21642 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
21643
21644 </ul></li>
21645
21646 <li>2013
21647 <ul>
21648
21649 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
21650
21651 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
21652
21653 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
21654
21655 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
21656
21657 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21658
21659 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
21660
21661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
21662
21663 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
21664
21665 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
21666
21667 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
21668
21669 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
21670
21671 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
21672
21673 </ul></li>
21674
21675 <li>2012
21676 <ul>
21677
21678 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
21679
21680 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
21681
21682 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
21683
21684 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
21685
21686 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
21687
21688 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
21689
21690 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
21691
21692 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
21693
21694 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
21695
21696 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
21697
21698 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
21699
21700 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
21701
21702 </ul></li>
21703
21704 <li>2011
21705 <ul>
21706
21707 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
21708
21709 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
21710
21711 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
21712
21713 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
21714
21715 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
21716
21717 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
21718
21719 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
21720
21721 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
21722
21723 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
21724
21725 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
21726
21727 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
21728
21729 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
21730
21731 </ul></li>
21732
21733 <li>2010
21734 <ul>
21735
21736 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
21737
21738 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
21739
21740 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
21741
21742 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
21743
21744 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21745
21746 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
21747
21748 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
21749
21750 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
21751
21752 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
21753
21754 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
21755
21756 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
21757
21758 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
21759
21760 </ul></li>
21761
21762 <li>2009
21763 <ul>
21764
21765 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
21766
21767 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
21768
21769 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
21770
21771 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
21772
21773 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21774
21775 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
21776
21777 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
21778
21779 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
21780
21781 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
21782
21783 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
21784
21785 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
21786
21787 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
21788
21789 </ul></li>
21790
21791 <li>2008
21792 <ul>
21793
21794 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
21795
21796 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
21797
21798 </ul></li>
21799
21800 </ul>
21801
21802
21803
21804 <h2>Tags</h2>
21805 <ul>
21806
21807  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
21808
21809  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
21810
21811  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
21812
21813  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
21814
21815  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
21816
21817  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
21818
21819  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
21820
21821  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
21822
21823  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (109)</a></li>
21824
21825  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (151)</a></li>
21826
21827  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
21828
21829  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
21830
21831  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (12)</a></li>
21832
21833  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
21834
21835  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (265)</a></li>
21836
21837  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (22)</a></li>
21838
21839  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
21840
21841  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (14)</a></li>
21842
21843  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
21844
21845  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (11)</a></li>
21846
21847  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (41)</a></li>
21848
21849  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
21850
21851  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
21852
21853  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
21854
21855  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
21856
21857  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
21858
21859  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
21860
21861  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
21862
21863  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (32)</a></li>
21864
21865  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (252)</a></li>
21866
21867  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (165)</a></li>
21868
21869  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (11)</a></li>
21870
21871  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
21872
21873  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (50)</a></li>
21874
21875  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (79)</a></li>
21876
21877  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
21878
21879  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
21880
21881  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
21882
21883  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
21884
21885  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
21886
21887  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
21888
21889  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
21890
21891  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
21892
21893  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (41)</a></li>
21894
21895  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
21896
21897  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
21898
21899  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (46)</a></li>
21900
21901  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
21902
21903  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
21904
21905  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (28)</a></li>
21906
21907  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
21908
21909  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
21910
21911  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (46)</a></li>
21912
21913  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
21914
21915  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (34)</a></li>
21916
21917 </ul>
21918
21919
21920     </div>
21921     <p style="text-align: right">
21922  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
21923 </p>
21924
21925   </body>
21926 </html>