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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/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 11,000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          7th January 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
  32 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than 11,000 title IDs
  33 in The Internet Movie Database so far.  Most of them (57%) are feature
  34 films from USA published before 1923.  I've also tracked down more
  35 than 24,000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title ID,
  36 so the real number could be a lot higher.  According to the front web
  37 page for <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film Vault</A>,
  38 there are 44,000 public domain films, so I guess there are still some
  39 left to identify.</p>
  40
  41 <p>The complete data set is available from
  42 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
  43 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.
  44 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
  45 "product catalog" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
  46 but any source I find believable is used.  I've so far had to throw
  47 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
  48 the movies listed.</p>
  49
  50 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
  51 far:</p>
  52
  53 <p><pre>
  54  2352 entries (   66 unique) with and 15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
  55  2302 entries (  120 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
  56   195 entries (   63 unique) with and   200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
  57    89 entries (   52 unique) with and    38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
  58   344 entries (   28 unique) with and   655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
  59   668 entries (  209 unique) with and  1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
  60   830 entries (   21 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
  61    19 entries (   19 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
  62  6822 entries ( 6669 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
  63   137 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
  64  1205 entries (   57 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
  65    84 entries (   20 unique) with and   167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
  66   158 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
  67   113 entries (    4 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
  68   182 entries (  100 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
  69   229 entries (   87 unique) with and     1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
  70    44 entries (    2 unique) with and    64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
  71   291 entries (   33 unique) with and   474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
  72   211 entries (    7 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
  73  1232 entries (   57 unique) with and  1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
  74    46 entries (   13 unique) with and    81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
  75   698 entries (   64 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
  76  1758 entries (  882 unique) with and  3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
  77    16 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
  78    63 entries (   16 unique) with and   141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
  79 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 8724 only in one list, 24647 without IMDB title ID
  80 </pre></p>
  81
  82 <p> I keep finding more data sources.  I found the cinemovies source
  83 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
  84 my list with 63 movies.  Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
  85 repository if you are curious how the lists are created.  Many of the
  86 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
  87 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
  88 if the year matches.  This allow me to automatically use many lists of
  89 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
  90 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain.  So far my
  91 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
  92 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
  93 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID.  It would make the job of
  94 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.</p>
  95
  96       </div>
  97       <div class="tags">
  98
  99
 100         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 101
 102
 103       </div>
 104     </div>
 105     <div class="padding"></div>
 106
 107     <div class="entry">
 108       <div class="title">
 109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
 110       </div>
 111       <div class="date">
 112         17th December 2017
 113       </div>
 114       <div class="body">
 115         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 116 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 117 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 118 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 119 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 120 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 121 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 122 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 123 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 124 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 125 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 126 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 127 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 128
 129 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 130 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 131 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 132 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 133 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 134
 135 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 136 team, flocking together on the
 137 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 138 mailing list and the
 139 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 140 IRC channel.</p>
 141
 142 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 143 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 144 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 145
 146       </div>
 147       <div class="tags">
 148
 149
 150         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>.
 151
 152
 153       </div>
 154     </div>
 155     <div class="padding"></div>
 156
 157     <div class="entry">
 158       <div class="title">
 159         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html">Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA</a>
 160       </div>
 161       <div class="date">
 162         13th December 2017
 163       </div>
 164       <div class="body">
 165         <p>While looking at
 166 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
 167 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
 168 an idea occurred to me.  The number of renewals are so few per year, it
 169 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
 170 the corresponding IMDB title ID.  This would give the (presumably)
 171 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
 172 enter the public domain for the transcribed year.  By fetching the
 173 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
 174 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
 175 are now in the public domain.  For the year 1955 (which is the one I
 176 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
 177 21.  For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
 178 500-600 pages.  It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
 179 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
 180 time.</p>
 181
 182 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
 183 listed for 1955):</p>
 184
 185 <p><blockquote>
 186   ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
 187   Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
 188   10Jun55; R151558.
 189 </blockquote></p>
 190
 191 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
 192 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
 193 DDmmmYY).  The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
 194 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found.  I am not
 195 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
 196 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
 197
 198 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
 199 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
 200 movie title using for example
 201 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all">http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all</a>.
 202 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
 203 first renewal entry from 1955 is
 204 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
 205
 206 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
 207 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
 208 down IMDB title IDs.  In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
 209 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
 210 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
 211 away.  By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
 212 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
 213 be able to discover any typos introduced.  But I will need help to
 214 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
 215 own.  If you would like to help, please get in touch.  Perhaps you can
 216 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
 217
 218 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
 219 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
 220 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
 221 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
 222 have copies of renewal for written works.  I have not been able to find
 223 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far.  Perhaps they exist
 224 somewhere?</p>
 225
 226 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
 227 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder.  At least
 228 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
 229 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
 230 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
 231 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
 232 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
 233
 234 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 235 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 236 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 237
 238       </div>
 239       <div class="tags">
 240
 241
 242         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 243
 244
 245       </div>
 246     </div>
 247     <div class="padding"></div>
 248
 249     <div class="entry">
 250       <div class="title">
 251         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html">Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from 1927 in the public domain or not?</a>
 252       </div>
 253       <div class="date">
 254          5th December 2017
 255       </div>
 256       <div class="body">
 257         <p>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
 258 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks">Empty Socks from
 259 1927</a>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library.  At the
 260 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
 261 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
 262 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html">my
 263 reasoning to conclude</a> that it would would enter the Norwegian
 264 equivalent of the public domain in 2053, based on my understanding of
 265 Norwegian Copyright Law.  But a few days ago, I came across
 266 <a href="http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham.4792291/">a
 267 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain</a>, at
 268 least in USA.  The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
 269 November or Desember 1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
 270 registered its copyright that year.  At that time, right holders of
 271 movies registered by the copyright office received government
 272 protection for there work for 28 years.  After 28 years, the copyright
 273 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
 274 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
 275 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in 1956.  Yet someone
 276 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
 277 protected.  Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
 278 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
 279 entries.  Ser.3 pt.12-13 v.9-12 1955-1958 Motion Pictures
 280 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1955r.html#film">available
 281 from the University of Pennsylvania</a>, neither in
 282 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=83;num=45">page
 283 45 for the first half of 1955</a>, nor in
 284 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=175;num=119">page
 285 119 for the second half of 1955</a>.  It is of course possible that
 286 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake.  Is
 287 there some way to rule out this possibility?  Please help, and update
 288 the wikipedia page with your findings.
 289
 290 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 291 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 292 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 293
 294       </div>
 295       <div class="tags">
 296
 297
 298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 299
 300
 301       </div>
 302     </div>
 303     <div class="padding"></div>
 304
 305     <div class="entry">
 306       <div class="title">
 307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html">Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive</a>
 308       </div>
 309       <div class="date">
 310         28th November 2017
 311       </div>
 312       <div class="body">
 313         <p>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
 314 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">the Internet Archive</a>, if the
 315 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate.  In the
 316 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
 317 love letter to the future.  The metadata in the Internet Archive could
 318 use a face lift for the future to love us back.  Here is a proposal
 319 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
 320 today.  I've been unable to find any document describing the various
 321 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
 322 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
 323 of the existing movies.</p>
 324
 325 <p>I have a few use cases in mind.  First of all, I would like to be
 326 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
 327 without duplicates.  I would further like to identify the IMDB title
 328 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
 329 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
 330 with my friends.</p>
 331
 332 <p>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
 333 archive
 334 (<a href="https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive">available
 335 from github</a>), to list as many of the good movies as possible.  The
 336 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
 337 parameters:</p>
 338
 339 <p><pre>
 340 collection:moviesandfilms
 341 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
 342 AND -mediatype:collection
 343 AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
 344 AND year
 345 </pre></p>
 346
 347 <p>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
 348 because the 'year' field is missing.  The 'year' field is populated by
 349 the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
 350 released (date or year).  Two such examples are
 351 <a href="https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905">Ben Hur
 352 from 1905</a> and
 353 <a href="https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama">Caminandes
 354 2: Gran Dillama from 2013</a>, where the year metadata field is
 355 missing.</p>
 356
 357 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
 358 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
 359 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
 360 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
 361
 362 <dl>
 363
 364 <dt>mediatype</dt>
 365 <dd>Should be 'movie' for movies.</dd>
 366
 367 <dt>collection</dt>
 368 <dd>Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.</dd>
 369
 370 <dt>title</dt>
 371 <dd>The title of the movie, without the publication year.</dd>
 372
 373 <dt>date</dt>
 374 <dd>The data or year the movie was released.  This make the movie show
 375 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
 376 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.</dd>
 377
 378 <dt>director</dt>
 379 <dd>The director of the movie.  This make it easier to know if the
 380 correct movie is found in movie databases.</dd>
 381
 382 <dt>publisher</dt>
 383 <dd>The production company making the movie.  Also useful for
 384 identifying the correct movie.</dd>
 385
 386 <dt>links</dt>
 387
 388 <dd>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: &lt;a
 389 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/"&gt;Movie in
 390 IMDB&lt;/a&gt;.  This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
 391 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive.  Other external
 392 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.</dd>
 393
 394 </dl>
 395
 396 <p>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
 397 example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
 398 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.</p>
 399
 400 <p>I created
 401 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 402 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
 403 Archive</a>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
 404 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates).  It would be great if
 405 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
 406 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
 407 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
 408 while before this happen.  If you have uploaded movies into the
 409 Internet Archive, you can help.  Please consider following my proposal
 410 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
 411 counted. :)</p>
 412
 413 <p>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
 414 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
 415 the Internet Archive.  But there are lots of movies without a
 416 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
 417 (like for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes">the
 418 Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
 419 one Wikidata entry).</p>
 420
 421 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 422 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 423 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 424
 425       </div>
 426       <div class="tags">
 427
 428
 429         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 430
 431
 432       </div>
 433     </div>
 434     <div class="padding"></div>
 435
 436     <div class="entry">
 437       <div class="title">
 438         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
 439       </div>
 440       <div class="date">
 441         18th November 2017
 442       </div>
 443       <div class="body">
 444         <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
 445 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
 446 check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
 447 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
 448 Internet.  I have continued to look for good data sources, and
 449 identified a few more.  The code used to extract information from
 450 various data sources is available in
 451 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 452 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
 453
 454 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs.  To gain
 455 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
 456 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
 457 year).  It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
 458 graph are located.  I wonder why they are placed there.  I suspect
 459 World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
 460 around 2010?</p>
 461
 462 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
 463
 464 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
 465 the public domain or with a free license.  This is the statistics
 466 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
 467
 468 <pre>
 469   249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
 470  2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
 471   830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
 472  2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
 473   291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
 474   144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
 475   350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
 476     4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
 477   698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
 478     8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
 479  3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
 480 </pre>
 481
 482 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
 483 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
 484 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
 485 movies that lack a IMDB title ID.  I've seen examples of all these
 486 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID.  Based
 487 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
 488 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
 489
 490 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
 491 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata.  I have
 492 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
 493 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far.  Perhaps you
 494 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
 495 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
 496 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
 497
 498 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
 499 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet.  If such page
 500 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
 501 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
 502 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
 503
 504 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 505 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 506 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 507
 508       </div>
 509       <div class="tags">
 510
 511
 512         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 513
 514
 515       </div>
 516     </div>
 517     <div class="padding"></div>
 518
 519     <div class="entry">
 520       <div class="title">
 521         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
 522       </div>
 523       <div class="date">
 524          1st November 2017
 525       </div>
 526       <div class="body">
 527         <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
 528 find these articles and papers interesting.  They have formed how I
 529 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
 530
 531 <ul>
 532
 533 <li>USENIX :login; <a
 534 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
 535 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance.  Analysis of Distributed Storage
 536 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
 537 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
 538 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 539
 540 <li>ZDNet
 541 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
 542 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 543
 544 <li>ZDNet
 545 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
 546 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 547
 548 <li>USENIX FAST'07
 549 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
 550 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
 551 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
 552
 553 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 554 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
 555 Integrity.  Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
 556 Hughes</li>
 557
 558 <li>USENIX FAST'08
 559 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
 560 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
 561 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
 562 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 563
 564 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
 565 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
 566 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
 567 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
 568
 569 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 570 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
 571 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?  A Comprehensive
 572 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
 573 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
 574
 575 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
 576 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
 577 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
 578 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
 579
 580 </ul>
 581
 582 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
 583 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
 584 opening.  The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
 585 redundant storage systems.  Details matter.  And unfortunately there
 586 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues.  Both
 587 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
 588 practical issues on their own.  I wonder how cluster file systems like
 589 Ceph do in this regard.  After all, there is an old saying, you know
 590 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
 591 never heard of stops you from getting any work done.  The same holds
 592 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
 593
 594 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
 595 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
 596 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
 597
 598 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 599 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 600 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 601
 602       </div>
 603       <div class="tags">
 604
 605
 606         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
 607
 608
 609       </div>
 610     </div>
 611     <div class="padding"></div>
 612
 613     <div class="entry">
 614       <div class="title">
 615         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html">Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team</a>
 616       </div>
 617       <div class="date">
 618         31st October 2017
 619       </div>
 620       <div class="body">
 621         <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
 622 know there are easily available web services available for writing
 623 LaTeX documents as a team.  I thought it was common knowledge, but to
 624 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
 625 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents.  Some of them even
 626 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
 627
 628 <p>There are two commercial services available,
 629 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
 630 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>.  They are very easy to
 631 use.  Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
 632 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing.  Note, these two
 633 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
 634 one joint service.  I've used both for different documents, and they
 635 work just fine.  While
 636 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
 637 software</a>, while the latter is not.  According to <a
 638 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
 639 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
 640 base maintained as free software.</p>
 641
 642 But these two are not the only alternatives.
 643 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
 644 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
 645 source available on github</a>.  I have not used it myself.  Several
 646 others can be found on the nice
 647 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
 648 web service</a>.
 649
 650 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
 651 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services.  You can even
 652 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
 653
 654 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 655 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 656 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 657
 658       </div>
 659       <div class="tags">
 660
 661
 662         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 663
 664
 665       </div>
 666     </div>
 667     <div class="padding"></div>
 668
 669     <div class="entry">
 670       <div class="title">
 671         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata</a>
 672       </div>
 673       <div class="date">
 674         25th October 2017
 675       </div>
 676       <div class="body">
 677         <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
 678 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
 679 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
 680 to can be freely distributed on the Internet.  This proved to be
 681 harder than it sounds.  IMDB for sure list movies without any
 682 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
 683 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
 684 Creative Commons.  These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
 685 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
 686 the information in IMDB.</p>
 687
 688 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
 689 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
 690 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
 691 feel how to do this.  It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
 692 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
 693 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie.  As I needed to check
 694 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable.  I simply
 695 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
 696 set.</p>
 697
 698 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
 699 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
 700 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
 701 metadata.  Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
 702 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
 703 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
 704
 705 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
 706 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
 707 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
 708 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
 709 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID.  This is useful based on the
 710 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
 711 legally distributed on the Internet.  With some help from the RDF
 712 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
 713 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
 714 Wikidata</a>:
 715
 716 <p><pre>
 717 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
 718 WHERE
 719 {
 720   ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
 721   ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
 722   ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
 723   OPTIONAL {
 724         ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
 725         ?work rdfs:label ?label.
 726         FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
 727   }
 728 }
 729 </pre></p>
 730
 731 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
 732 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
 733 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
 734 of the latter two are available.  At the moment the result set contain
 735 2338 entries.  Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
 736 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
 737 for the movie.  It should be noted that the result will include
 738 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages.  There are
 739 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
 740 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
 741 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
 742 automatically.</p>
 743
 744 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
 745 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
 746 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
 747 free movies and their IMDB ID.  In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
 748 the refered Internet Archive entry.  I assume the 70 "disappearing"
 749 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
 750
 751 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
 752 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
 753 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
 754 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
 755 on Wikipedia.</p>
 756
 757 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
 758 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
 759 years:<p>
 760
 761 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
 762
 763 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
 764 be similar.</p>
 765
 766 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
 767 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
 768 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
 769 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
 770
 771 <p><pre>
 772 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
 773 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
 774 </pre></p>
 775
 776 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
 777 introduce a typo.</p>
 778
 779 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
 780 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
 781 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
 782 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
 783 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
 784 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
 785 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
 786 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
 787 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
 788 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
 789 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
 790 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
 791 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
 792 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
 793 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
 794 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
 795 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
 796 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
 797 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
 798 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
 799 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
 800 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
 801 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
 802 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
 803 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
 804 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
 805 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
 806 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
 807 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
 808 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
 809 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
 810 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
 811 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
 812 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
 813 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
 814 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
 815 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
 816 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
 817 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
 818 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
 819 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
 820 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
 821 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
 822 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
 823 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
 824 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
 825 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
 826 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
 827 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
 828 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
 829 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
 830 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
 831 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
 832 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
 833 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
 834 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
 835 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
 836 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
 837 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
 838 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
 839 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
 840 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
 841 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
 842 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
 843 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
 844 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
 845 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
 846 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
 847 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
 848 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
 849 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
 850 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
 851 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
 852 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
 853 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
 854 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
 855 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
 856 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
 857 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
 858 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
 859 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
 860 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
 861 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
 862 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
 863 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
 864 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
 865 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
 866 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
 867 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
 868 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
 869 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
 870 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
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 951 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
 952
 953 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 954 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 955 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 956
 957       </div>
 958       <div class="tags">
 959
 960
 961         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 962
 963
 964       </div>
 965     </div>
 966     <div class="padding"></div>
 967
 968     <div class="entry">
 969       <div class="title">
 970         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
 971       </div>
 972       <div class="date">
 973         14th October 2017
 974       </div>
 975       <div class="body">
 976         <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
 977 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea.  The
 978 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
 979 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
 980 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
 981 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
 982 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
 983 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
 984 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
 985
 986 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
 987 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
 988 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
 989
 990 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 991 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 992 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 993
 994       </div>
 995       <div class="tags">
 996
 997
 998         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 999
1000
1001       </div>
1002     </div>
1003     <div class="padding"></div>
1004
1005     <div class="entry">
1006       <div class="title">
1007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
1008       </div>
1009       <div class="date">
1010          9th October 2017
1011       </div>
1012       <div class="body">
1013         <p>At my nearby maker space,
1014 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
1015 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
1016 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
1017 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
1018 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
1019 as the software involved,
1020 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
1021 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
1022 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
1023 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
1024 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
1025 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
1026 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
1027
1028 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
1029 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
1030 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
1031 on
1032 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1033 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
1034
1035 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
1036 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
1037 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
1038 upstream version.</p>
1039
1040 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
1041 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
1042 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
1043 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
1044 Debian, check out
1045 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
1046 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
1047 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
1048
1049 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1050 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1051 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1052
1053       </div>
1054       <div class="tags">
1055
1056
1057         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>.
1058
1059
1060       </div>
1061     </div>
1062     <div class="padding"></div>
1063
1064     <div class="entry">
1065       <div class="title">
1066         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
1067       </div>
1068       <div class="date">
1069         29th September 2017
1070       </div>
1071       <div class="body">
1072         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
1073 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
1074 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
1075 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
1076 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
1077 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
1078 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
1079 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
1080 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
1081 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
1082 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
1083 listen.</p>
1084
1085 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
1086 visualizing this information up and running for
1087 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
1088 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
1089 library.  The solution is based on the
1090 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
1091 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
1092 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
1093 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
1094 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
1095 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
1096 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
1097 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
1098
1099 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
1100 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
1101 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
1102 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
1103 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
1104 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
1105 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
1106 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
1107
1108 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
1109 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
1110 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
1111 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
1112 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
1113 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
1114 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
1115 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
1116 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
1117 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
1118 mentioned in
1119 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
1120 issue for the topic</a>.
1121
1122 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
1123
1124       </div>
1125       <div class="tags">
1126
1127
1128         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1129
1130
1131       </div>
1132     </div>
1133     <div class="padding"></div>
1134
1135     <div class="entry">
1136       <div class="title">
1137         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
1138       </div>
1139       <div class="date">
1140         24th September 2017
1141       </div>
1142       <div class="body">
1143         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
1144 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
1145 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
1146 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
1147 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
1148 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
1149 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
1150 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
1151 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
1152
1153 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
1154 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
1155 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
1156 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
1157
1158 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
1159 clone of two python scripts:</p>
1160
1161 <ol>
1162
1163 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
1164   testing).</li>
1165
1166 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
1167   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
1168
1169 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
1170   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
1171
1172 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
1173
1174 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
1175   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
1176   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
1177
1178 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
1179   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
1180
1181 </ol>
1182
1183 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
1184 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
1185 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
1186 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
1187 very cheaply
1188 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
1189 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
1190 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
1191
1192 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
1193 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
1194 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
1195 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
1196 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
1197 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
1198 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
1199 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
1200
1201 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
1202 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
1203 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
1204 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
1205 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
1206 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
1207 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
1208 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
1209 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
1210 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
1211 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
1212 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
1213
1214       </div>
1215       <div class="tags">
1216
1217
1218         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1219
1220
1221       </div>
1222     </div>
1223     <div class="padding"></div>
1224
1225     <div class="entry">
1226       <div class="title">
1227         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
1228       </div>
1229       <div class="date">
1230          9th August 2017
1231       </div>
1232       <div class="body">
1233         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
1234 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
1235 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
1236 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
1237 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
1238 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
1239 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
1240
1241 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
1242 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
1243 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
1244 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
1245 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
1246 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
1247 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
1248 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
1249 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
1250 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
1251 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
1252 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
1253 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
1254
1255 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
1256 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
1257 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
1258 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
1259 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
1260 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
1261 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
1262 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
1263 collector for a few days now.</p>
1264
1265 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
1266
1267 <ol>
1268
1269 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
1270
1271 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
1272 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
1273
1274 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
1275
1276 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
1277 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
1278 found a GSM station).</li>
1279
1280 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
1281
1282 </ol>
1283
1284 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
1285 running, I decided to package
1286 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
1287 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
1288 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
1289 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
1290 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
1291
1292 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
1293 commercial tools like
1294 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
1295 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
1296 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
1297 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
1298 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
1299 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
1300 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
1301 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
1302 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
1303 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
1304 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
1305 of government officials...</p>
1306
1307 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
1308 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
1309 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
1310 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
1311 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
1312 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
1313 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
1314 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
1315 one frequency?</p>
1316
1317       </div>
1318       <div class="tags">
1319
1320
1321         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1322
1323
1324       </div>
1325     </div>
1326     <div class="padding"></div>
1327
1328     <div class="entry">
1329       <div class="title">
1330         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
1331       </div>
1332       <div class="date">
1333         25th July 2017
1334       </div>
1335       <div class="body">
1336         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
1337
1338 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1339 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1340 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
1341 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
1342 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
1343 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
1344 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
1345 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
1346 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
1347 as a web page</a>.</p>
1348
1349 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
1350 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
1351 in
1352 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
1353 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
1354 and
1355 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
1356 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
1357 project.  I hope
1358 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
1359 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
1360
1361       </div>
1362       <div class="tags">
1363
1364
1365         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1366
1367
1368       </div>
1369     </div>
1370     <div class="padding"></div>
1371
1372     <div class="entry">
1373       <div class="title">
1374         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html">Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions</a>
1375       </div>
1376       <div class="date">
1377         12th June 2017
1378       </div>
1379       <div class="body">
1380         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
1381 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
1382 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
1383 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
1384 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
1385 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
1386 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
1387 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
1388 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
1389 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
1390 edition is available for free from
1391 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
1392
1393 <table border="0">
1394 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
1395 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
1396
1397 <tr>
1398   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
1399   <td align="right">3</td>
1400   <td align="right">6</td>
1401   <td align="right">15</td>
1402 </tr>
1403
1404 <tr>
1405   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
1406   <td align="right">7</td>
1407   <td align="right">1</td>
1408   <td align="right">0</td>
1409 </tr>
1410
1411 <tr>
1412   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
1413   <td align="right">14</td>
1414   <td align="right">27</td>
1415   <td align="right">16</td>
1416 </tr>
1417
1418 <tr>
1419   <td>Total</td>
1420   <td align="right">24</td>
1421   <td align="right">34</td>
1422   <td align="right">31</td>
1423 </tr>
1424
1425 </table>
1426
1427 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
1428 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
1429
1430 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
1431 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
1432 touch.</p>
1433
1434       </div>
1435       <div class="tags">
1436
1437
1438         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>.
1439
1440
1441       </div>
1442     </div>
1443     <div class="padding"></div>
1444
1445     <div class="entry">
1446       <div class="title">
1447         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
1448       </div>
1449       <div class="date">
1450         10th June 2017
1451       </div>
1452       <div class="body">
1453         <p>I am very happy to report that the
1454 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
1455 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
1456 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
1457 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
1458 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
1459
1460 <ul>
1461
1462  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
1463  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
1464    correspondencepartInternal</li>
1465  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
1466    regualr basis.</li>
1467  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
1468  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
1469    available via URLs in _links.</li>
1470  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
1471  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
1472  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
1473  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
1474  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
1475  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
1476  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
1477  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1478  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1479  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
1480  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
1481  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
1482  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
1483  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
1484  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
1485    style.</li>
1486  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
1487  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
1488  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
1489  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
1490    to the official names.</li>
1491  <li>...</li>
1492
1493 </ul>
1494
1495 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
1496 on irc.freenode.net) or email
1497 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
1498 mailing list).</p>
1499
1500       </div>
1501       <div class="tags">
1502
1503
1504         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1505
1506
1507       </div>
1508     </div>
1509     <div class="padding"></div>
1510
1511     <div class="entry">
1512       <div class="title">
1513         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</a>
1514       </div>
1515       <div class="date">
1516          7th June 2017
1517       </div>
1518       <div class="body">
1519         <p><em>This is a copy of
1520 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
1521 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
1522 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
1523 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
1524 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
1525 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
1526
1527 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
1528 stored in Noark 5.
1529 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
1530 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
1531 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
1532 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
1533 the documents in the archive.</p>
1534
1535 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
1536 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
1537 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
1538 stamping?</p>
1539
1540 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
1541 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
1542 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
1543 attributes:</p>
1544
1545 <ul>
1546
1547 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
1548 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
1549 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
1550 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
1551
1552 </ul>
1553
1554 <p>This assume a service following
1555 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
1556 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
1557 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
1558 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
1559 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
1560 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
1561 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
1562 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
1563 itself.</p>
1564
1565 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
1566 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
1567 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
1568 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
1569 compromised.</p>
1570
1571 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
1572 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
1573 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
1574 above).</p>
1575
1576 <p><blockquote><pre>
1577 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
1578   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
1579       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
1580 </pre></blockquote></p>
1581
1582 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
1583 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
1584
1585 <p><blockquote><pre>
1586 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
1587   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
1588 </pre></blockquote></p>
1589
1590 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
1591 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
1592 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
1593 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
1594 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
1595
1596 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
1597
1598 <p><blockquote><pre>
1599 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
1600   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
1601 </pre></blockquote></p>
1602
1603 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
1604 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
1605
1606       </div>
1607       <div class="tags">
1608
1609
1610         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1611
1612
1613       </div>
1614     </div>
1615     <div class="padding"></div>
1616
1617     <div class="entry">
1618       <div class="title">
1619         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html">Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents</a>
1620       </div>
1621       <div class="date">
1622         19th March 2017
1623       </div>
1624       <div class="body">
1625         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
1626 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
1627 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
1628 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
1629 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
1630 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
1631 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
1632 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
1633 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
1634 Unix User Group
1635 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
1636 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
1637 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
1638 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
1639 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
1640 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
1641 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
1642 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
1643 itches.</p>
1644
1645 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
1646 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
1647 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
1648 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
1649 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
1650 project mailing list</a>.</p>
1651
1652 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
1653 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
1654 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
1655 completed an implementation of a command line tool
1656 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
1657 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
1658 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
1659 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
1660 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
1661 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
1662 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
1663 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
1664 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
1665 our API tester:</p>
1666
1667 <p><blockquote><pre>
1668 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1669 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1670 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1671
1672  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1673  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1674 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
1675 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1676   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
1677   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1678 ~/src//noark5-tester$
1679 </pre></blockquote></p>
1680
1681 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
1682 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
1683 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
1684 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
1685
1686 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
1687 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
1688 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
1689 tester currently use
1690 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
1691 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
1692 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
1693 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
1694 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
1695 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
1696 specification.</p>
1697
1698 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
1699 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
1700 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
1701 and we have
1702 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
1703 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
1704 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
1705 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
1706 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
1707 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system</a>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/2017-03-15-mangel-prosess.md">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports</a> :).
1708
1709 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
1710 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
1711 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
1712 implemented in Python.</p>
1713
1714       </div>
1715       <div class="tags">
1716
1717
1718         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1719
1720
1721       </div>
1722     </div>
1723     <div class="padding"></div>
1724
1725     <div class="entry">
1726       <div class="title">
1727         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
1728       </div>
1729       <div class="date">
1730          9th March 2017
1731       </div>
1732       <div class="body">
1733         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
1734 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
1735 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
1736 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
1737 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
1738 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
1739 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
1740 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
1741
1742 <p><blockquote>
1743 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
1744 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
1745 </blockquote></p>
1746
1747 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
1748 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
1749 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
1750 are noticed.</p>
1751
1752 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
1753 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
1754 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
1755 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
1756 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
1757 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
1758
1759 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
1760 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
1761 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
1762 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
1763 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
1764 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
1765
1766 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
1767
1768 <p><blockquote><pre>
1769 [...]
1770 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
1771 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
1772         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
1773         age:    7863311
1774         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
1775         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
1776         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
1777         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
1778         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
1779         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
1780         per-op statistics
1781                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1782              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
1783              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
1784               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
1785               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
1786             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
1787                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
1788                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
1789               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
1790                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
1791              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
1792                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
1793               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
1794                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
1795               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
1796                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
1797              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
1798          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
1799               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
1800               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
1801             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
1802               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1803
1804 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
1805 [...]
1806 </pre></blockquote></p>
1807
1808 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1809 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1810 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
1811 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1812 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1813 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1814 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
1815 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1816 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1817 mount options.</p>
1818
1819 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1820 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1821 But according to
1822 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
1823 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
1824 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
1825 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
1826 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
1827 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
1828
1829 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1830 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
1831 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1832 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
1833 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
1834
1835       </div>
1836       <div class="tags">
1837
1838
1839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1840
1841
1842       </div>
1843     </div>
1844     <div class="padding"></div>
1845
1846     <div class="entry">
1847       <div class="title">
1848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html">How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...</a>
1849       </div>
1850       <div class="date">
1851          8th March 2017
1852       </div>
1853       <div class="body">
1854         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
1855 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
1856 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
1857 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
1858 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
1859 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
1860 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
1861
1862 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
1863 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
1864 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
1865 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
1866 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
1867 world.</p>
1868
1869 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
1870 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
1871 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
1872 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
1873
1874 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
1875 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
1876 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
1877 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
1878 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
1879 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
1880 unable to grasp it.</p>
1881
1882 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
1883 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
1884 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
1885
1886       </div>
1887       <div class="tags">
1888
1889
1890         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>.
1891
1892
1893       </div>
1894     </div>
1895     <div class="padding"></div>
1896
1897     <div class="entry">
1898       <div class="title">
1899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
1900       </div>
1901       <div class="date">
1902          3rd March 2017
1903       </div>
1904       <div class="body">
1905         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1906 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1907 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1908 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1909 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1910 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
1911 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
1912 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1913 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
1914
1915 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
1916
1917 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1918 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1919 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
1920 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
1921 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
1922 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
1923 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
1924 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
1925
1926       </div>
1927       <div class="tags">
1928
1929
1930         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1931
1932
1933       </div>
1934     </div>
1935     <div class="padding"></div>
1936
1937     <div class="entry">
1938       <div class="title">
1939         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
1940       </div>
1941       <div class="date">
1942          1st March 2017
1943       </div>
1944       <div class="body">
1945         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1946 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
1947 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1948 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1949 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1950 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
1951 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
1952 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
1953 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
1954 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1955 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1956
1957 <blockquote><pre>
1958 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1959   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1960   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1961      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1962      sleep 1; \
1963   done
1964 300
1965 0+1 oppføringer inn
1966 0+1 oppføringer ut
1967 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
1968 4
1969 8
1970 12
1971 17
1972 21
1973 %
1974 </pre></blockquote>
1975
1976 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
1977 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1978 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
1979 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1980
1981 <blockquote><pre>
1982 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1983   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1984   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1985      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1986      sleep 1; \
1987   done
1988 1079
1989 0+1 oppføringer inn
1990 0+1 oppføringer ut
1991 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1992 433
1993 1028
1994 1031
1995 1035
1996 1038
1997 %
1998 </pre></blockquote>
1999
2000 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
2001 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
2002
2003 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
2004 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
2005 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
2006 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
2007 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
2008 post.</p>
2009
2010       </div>
2011       <div class="tags">
2012
2013
2014         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2015
2016
2017       </div>
2018     </div>
2019     <div class="padding"></div>
2020
2021     <div class="entry">
2022       <div class="title">
2023         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
2024       </div>
2025       <div class="date">
2026         21st February 2017
2027       </div>
2028       <div class="body">
2029         <p>I just noticed
2030 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
2031 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
2032 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
2033 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
2034 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
2035 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
2036 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
2037 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
2038 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
2039 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
2040
2041 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
2042 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
2043 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
2044 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
2045 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
2046 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
2047 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
2048 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
2049 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
2050
2051       </div>
2052       <div class="tags">
2053
2054
2055         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>.
2056
2057
2058       </div>
2059     </div>
2060     <div class="padding"></div>
2061
2062     <div class="entry">
2063       <div class="title">
2064         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html">Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)</a>
2065       </div>
2066       <div class="date">
2067         13th February 2017
2068       </div>
2069       <div class="body">
2070         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
2071 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
2072 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
2073 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
2074 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
2075 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
2076 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
2077 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
2078 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
2079 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
2080 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
2081 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
2082 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
2083
2084 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
2085 Norwegian from
2086 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
2087 blog</a>.  This also include
2088 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
2089 ruling itself</a>.</p>
2090
2091       </div>
2092       <div class="tags">
2093
2094
2095         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2096
2097
2098       </div>
2099     </div>
2100     <div class="padding"></div>
2101
2102     <div class="entry">
2103       <div class="title">
2104         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll</a>
2105       </div>
2106       <div class="date">
2107          3rd February 2017
2108       </div>
2109       <div class="body">
2110         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
2111
2112 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
2113 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
2114 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
2115 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
2116 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
2117 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
2118 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
2119 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
2120 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
2121
2122 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
2123 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
2124 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
2125 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
2126 year, without following
2127 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
2128 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
2129 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
2130 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
2131 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
2132 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
2133 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
2134 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
2135 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
2136 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
2137 millions of movies
2138 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
2139 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
2140 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
2141 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
2142 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
2143 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
2144
2145 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
2146 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
2147 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
2148 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
2149 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
2150 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
2151 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
2152 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
2153 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
2154 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
2155 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
2156 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
2157 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
2158
2159 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
2160 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
2161 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
2162 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
2163 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
2164 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
2165 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
2166 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
2167 seriously.</p>
2168
2169 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
2170 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
2171 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
2172 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
2173 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
2174 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
2175 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
2176 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
2177 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
2178
2179 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
2180 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
2181 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
2182 on both sides.</p>
2183
2184       </div>
2185       <div class="tags">
2186
2187
2188         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2189
2190
2191       </div>
2192     </div>
2193     <div class="padding"></div>
2194
2195     <div class="entry">
2196       <div class="title">
2197         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
2198       </div>
2199       <div class="date">
2200          9th January 2017
2201       </div>
2202       <div class="body">
2203         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
2204 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
2205 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
2206 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
2207 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
2208 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
2209 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
2210 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
2211 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
2212 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
2213 this:
2214
2215 <p><pre>
2216 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
2217  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
2218  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
2219  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
2220  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
2221  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
2222  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
2223  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
2224  8  * * *
2225  9  * * *
2226 [...]
2227 </pre></p>
2228
2229 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
2230 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
2231 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
2232 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
2233 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
2234 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
2235 traceroute request.</p>
2236
2237 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
2238 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
2239 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
2240 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
2241 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
2242
2243 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
2244 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
2245 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
2246 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
2247 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
2248 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
2249 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
2250 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
2251 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
2252
2253 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
2254 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
2255 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
2256 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
2257 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
2258 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
2259 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
2260 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
2261 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
2262 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
2263 render the page (in HAR format using
2264 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
2265 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
2266 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
2267 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
2268 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
2269
2270 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
2271 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
2272
2273 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
2274 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
2275 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
2276 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
2277 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
2278 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
2279 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
2280 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
2281 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
2282 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
2283 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
2284 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
2285 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
2286 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
2287
2288 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
2289 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
2290
2291 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
2292 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
2293 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
2294 question.
2295 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
2296 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
2297 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
2298 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
2299 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
2300 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
2301 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
2302
2303 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
2304 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
2305
2306 <p>In the process, I came across the
2307 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
2308 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
2309 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
2310 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
2311 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
2312 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
2313 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
2314 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
2315 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
2316 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
2317 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
2318 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
2319 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
2320 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
2321
2322 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
2323 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
2324
2325 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
2326 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
2327 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
2328 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
2329
2330 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
2331 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
2332 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
2333 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
2334 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
2335 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
2336 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
2337
2338 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
2339 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
2340 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
2341 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
2342 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
2343 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
2344 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
2345
2346 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
2347 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
2348 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
2349 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
2350
2351 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2352 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2353 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2354
2355       </div>
2356       <div class="tags">
2357
2358
2359         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2360
2361
2362       </div>
2363     </div>
2364     <div class="padding"></div>
2365
2366     <div class="entry">
2367       <div class="title">
2368         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html">Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries</a>
2369       </div>
2370       <div class="date">
2371          4th January 2017
2372       </div>
2373       <div class="body">
2374         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
2375 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
2376 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
2377 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
2378 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
2379 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
2380 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
2381 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
2382 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
2383 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
2384 consumption.  The
2385 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
2386 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
2387 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
2388 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
2389 module</a>.</p>
2390
2391 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
2392 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
2393 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
2394 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
2395 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
2396 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
2397
2398 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
2399
2400 <p><pre>
2401 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
2402 Found 3612 vevents
2403 Found 6 vtodos
2404 Found 2 vjournals
2405 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
2406 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
2407 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
2408 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
2409 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
2410 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
2411 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
2412 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
2413 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
2414 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
2415 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
2416 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
2417 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
2418 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
2419 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
2420 %
2421 </pre></p>
2422
2423 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
2424 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
2425 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
2426 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
2427 collections.</p>
2428
2429 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
2430 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
2431 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
2432 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
2433 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
2434
2435 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2436 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2437 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2438
2439       </div>
2440       <div class="tags">
2441
2442
2443         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>.
2444
2445
2446       </div>
2447     </div>
2448     <div class="padding"></div>
2449
2450     <div class="entry">
2451       <div class="title">
2452         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
2453       </div>
2454       <div class="date">
2455         23rd December 2016
2456       </div>
2457       <div class="body">
2458         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
2459 readers probably know, I have been working on the
2460 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
2461 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
2462 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
2463 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
2464 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
2465 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
2466 metadata format.  And today,
2467 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
2468 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
2469 ie using fnmatch():</p>
2470
2471 <p><pre>
2472 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
2473   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2474 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
2475 Name: pymissile
2476 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
2477 Package: pymissile
2478 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
2479 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
2480 Name: libnxt
2481 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
2482 Package: libnxt
2483 ---
2484 Identifier: t2n [generic]
2485 Name: t2n
2486 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
2487 Package: t2n
2488 ---
2489 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
2490 Name: python-nxt
2491 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
2492 Package: python-nxt
2493 ---
2494 Identifier: nbc [generic]
2495 Name: nbc
2496 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
2497 Package: nbc
2498 %
2499 </pre></p>
2500
2501 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
2502 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
2503
2504 <p><pre>
2505 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2506 pymissile
2507 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
2508 libnxt
2509 nbc
2510 python-nxt
2511 t2n
2512 %
2513 </pre></p>
2514
2515 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
2516 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
2517
2518 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
2519 make the most of the hardware they have, please
2520 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
2521 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
2522 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
2523 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
2524 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
2525 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
2526 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
2527 part of my involvement in
2528 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
2529 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
2530 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
2531 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
2532 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
2533 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
2534 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
2535 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
2536 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
2537
2538 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2539 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2540 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2541
2542       </div>
2543       <div class="tags">
2544
2545
2546         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
2547
2548
2549       </div>
2550     </div>
2551     <div class="padding"></div>
2552
2553     <div class="entry">
2554       <div class="title">
2555         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
2556       </div>
2557       <div class="date">
2558         20th December 2016
2559       </div>
2560       <div class="body">
2561         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2562 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
2563 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
2564 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
2565 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
2566 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
2567 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
2568 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
2569 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
2570 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
2571
2572 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
2573
2574 <p><pre>
2575 % isenkram-lookup
2576 bluez
2577 cheese
2578 ethtool
2579 fprintd
2580 fprintd-demo
2581 gkrellm-thinkbat
2582 hdapsd
2583 libpam-fprintd
2584 pidgin-blinklight
2585 thinkfan
2586 tlp
2587 tp-smapi-dkms
2588 tp-smapi-source
2589 tpb
2590 %
2591 </pre></p>
2592
2593 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
2594 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
2595 I have all the firmware my machine need:
2596
2597 <p><pre>
2598 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2599 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
2600 %
2601 </pre></p>
2602
2603 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
2604 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
2605 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
2606 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
2607 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
2608 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
2609 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
2610 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
2611
2612 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
2613 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
2614 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
2615
2616 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
2617 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
2618 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
2619 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
2620 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
2621 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
2622 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
2623 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
2624 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
2625 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
2626 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
2627 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
2628 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
2629 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
2630 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
2631 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
2632 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
2633 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
2634 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
2635 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
2636 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
2637 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
2638 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
2639 zd1211-firmware</p>
2640
2641 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
2642 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
2643 maintainer to
2644 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
2645 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
2646 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
2647 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
2648
2649 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
2650 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
2651 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
2652 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
2653 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
2654
2655       </div>
2656       <div class="tags">
2657
2658
2659         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
2660
2661
2662       </div>
2663     </div>
2664     <div class="padding"></div>
2665
2666     <div class="entry">
2667       <div class="title">
2668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
2669       </div>
2670       <div class="date">
2671         11th December 2016
2672       </div>
2673       <div class="body">
2674         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
2675
2676 <p>In my early years, I played
2677 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
2678 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
2679 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
2680 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
2681 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
2682 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
2683 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
2684 small.</p>
2685
2686 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
2687 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
2688 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
2689 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
2690 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
2691 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
2692 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
2693 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
2694 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
2695
2696 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
2697 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
2698 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
2699 advantages of the
2700 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
2701 where information about each planet is easily available with common
2702 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
2703 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
2704 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
2705 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
2706 after less then a week.</p>
2707
2708 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
2709 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
2710 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
2711
2712 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2713 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2714 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2715
2716       </div>
2717       <div class="tags">
2718
2719
2720         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2721
2722
2723       </div>
2724     </div>
2725     <div class="padding"></div>
2726
2727     <div class="entry">
2728       <div class="title">
2729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
2730       </div>
2731       <div class="date">
2732         25th November 2016
2733       </div>
2734       <div class="body">
2735         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
2736 installation system, observing how using
2737 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
2738 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
2739 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
2740 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
2741 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
2742 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
2743 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
2744 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
2745 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
2746 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
2747 up the process make perfect sense.
2748
2749 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
2750 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
2751 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
2752 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
2753 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
2754 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
2755 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
2756 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
2757 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
2758 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
2759
2760 <blockquote><pre>
2761 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
2762 </pre></blockquote>
2763
2764 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
2765 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
2766 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
2767 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
2768 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
2769 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
2770 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
2771 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
2772 tested its impact.</p>
2773
2774
2775       </div>
2776       <div class="tags">
2777
2778
2779         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>.
2780
2781
2782       </div>
2783     </div>
2784     <div class="padding"></div>
2785
2786     <div class="entry">
2787       <div class="title">
2788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
2789       </div>
2790       <div class="date">
2791         13th November 2016
2792       </div>
2793       <div class="body">
2794         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
2795 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
2796 multi-threaded program, finally
2797 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
2798 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
2799 months since
2800 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
2801 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
2802 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
2803 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
2804 JavaScript libraries.</p>
2805
2806 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
2807
2808 <p><blockquote>
2809 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
2810 </blockquote></p>
2811
2812 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
2813 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
2814 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
2815 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
2816 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
2817
2818 <p><blockquote>
2819 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
2820 </blockquote></p>
2821
2822 <p>See the project home page and the
2823 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
2824 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
2825 working.</p>
2826
2827       </div>
2828       <div class="tags">
2829
2830
2831         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2832
2833
2834       </div>
2835     </div>
2836     <div class="padding"></div>
2837
2838     <div class="entry">
2839       <div class="title">
2840         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html">How to talk with your loved ones in private</a>
2841       </div>
2842       <div class="date">
2843          7th November 2016
2844       </div>
2845       <div class="body">
2846         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
2847 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
2848 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
2849 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
2850 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
2851 a blog post from Sander Venima about
2852 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
2853 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
2854 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
2855 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
2856 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
2857 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
2858 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
2859 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
2860 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
2861 use, it is also useful to have a look at
2862 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
2863 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
2864 provide valuable information.</p>
2865
2866 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
2867 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
2868 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
2869 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
2870 used by many:</p>
2871
2872 <ul>
2873
2874 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
2875 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
2876 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
2877 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
2878 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
2879
2880 </ul>
2881
2882 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
2883
2884 <ul>
2885
2886 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
2887 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
2888 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
2889 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
2890 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
2891
2892 </ul>
2893
2894 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
2895
2896 <ul>
2897
2898 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
2899 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
2900 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
2901 <li>VoIP w/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP">ZRTP</a> or controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol">SRTP</a> (e.g using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple">CSipSimple</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone">Linphone</a>)</li>
2902 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
2903 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
2904 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
2905 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
2906 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
2907 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
2908
2909 </ul>
2910
2911 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
2912 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
2913 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
2914
2915 <ul>
2916
2917 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
2918 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
2919 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
2920 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
2921
2922 </ul>
2923
2924 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
2925 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
2926 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
2927 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
2928 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
2929 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
2930 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
2931 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
2932 their loved ones.</p>
2933
2934 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
2935 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
2936 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
2937 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
2938 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
2939 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
2940 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
2941 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
2942 a non-starter for most.</p>
2943
2944 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
2945 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
2946 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
2947 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
2948 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
2949 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
2950 less invaded.</p>
2951
2952       </div>
2953       <div class="tags">
2954
2955
2956         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>.
2957
2958
2959       </div>
2960     </div>
2961     <div class="padding"></div>
2962
2963     <div class="entry">
2964       <div class="title">
2965         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
2966       </div>
2967       <div class="date">
2968          4th November 2016
2969       </div>
2970       <div class="body">
2971         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
2972 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
2973 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
2974 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
2975 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
2976 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
2977 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
2978 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
2979 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
2980 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
2981 and had
2982 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
2983 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
2984 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
2985 loved ones. :)</p>
2986
2987 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2988 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2989 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2990 building
2991 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
2992 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
2993 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
2994 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2995 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2996 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2997 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
2998 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
2999
3000 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
3001
3002 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
3003 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
3004 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
3005 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
3006 the battery status run low:</p>
3007
3008 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
3009    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
3010 </video></p>
3011
3012 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
3013 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
3014
3015 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
3016 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
3017 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
3018 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
3019 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
3020 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
3021 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
3022 should.</p>
3023
3024       </div>
3025       <div class="tags">
3026
3027
3028         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
3029
3030
3031       </div>
3032     </div>
3033     <div class="padding"></div>
3034
3035     <div class="entry">
3036       <div class="title">
3037         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
3038       </div>
3039       <div class="date">
3040         10th October 2016
3041       </div>
3042       <div class="body">
3043         <p>In July
3044 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
3045 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
3046 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
3047 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
3048
3049 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
3050 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
3051 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
3052 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
3053 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
3054 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
3055 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
3056 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
3057 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
3058 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
3059 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
3060 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
3061 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
3062 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
3063 time.</p>
3064
3065 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
3066 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
3067 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
3068 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
3069 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
3070 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
3071 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
3072
3073 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
3074 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
3075 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
3076 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
3077 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
3078 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
3079 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
3080 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
3081 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
3082 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
3083
3084 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
3085
3086 <ol>
3087
3088 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
3089 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
3090 know, so you need to install it.
3091
3092 <pre>
3093 apt install git tor chromium
3094 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
3095 </pre></li>
3096
3097 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
3098 block below.</li>
3099
3100 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
3101 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
3102
3103 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
3104 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
3105 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
3106 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
3107 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
3108
3109 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
3110 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
3111 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
3112 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
3113 a associated contact database.</li>
3114
3115 </ol>
3116
3117 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
3118 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
3119 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
3120 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
3121 example
3122 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
3123 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
3124 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
3125 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
3126 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
3127 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
3128 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
3129 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
3130 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
3131 working on Debian Stable.</p>
3132
3133 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
3134 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
3135 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
3136
3137 <pre>
3138 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
3139 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
3140 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
3141 --- a/js/background.js
3142 +++ b/js/background.js
3143 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
3144          });
3145      });
3146
3147 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
3148 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
3149      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
3150 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
3151 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
3152      var messageReceiver;
3153      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
3154          if (messageReceiver) {
3155 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
3156 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
3157 --- a/js/expire.js
3158 +++ b/js/expire.js
3159 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
3160  ;(function() {
3161      'use strict';
3162 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
3163 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
3164
3165      window.extension = window.extension || {};
3166
3167 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
3168 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
3169 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
3170 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
3171 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
3172              return {
3173                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
3174                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
3175 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
3176 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
3177 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
3178              };
3179          },
3180          clearQR: function() {
3181 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
3182 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
3183 --- a/options.html
3184 +++ b/options.html
3185 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
3186          &lt;div class='nav'>
3187            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
3188            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
3189 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
3190 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
3191 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
3192 +
3193 +         &lt;/div>
3194            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
3195            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
3196            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
3197 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
3198 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
3199 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
3200 +#!/bin/sh
3201 +set -e
3202 +cd $(dirname $0)
3203 +mkdir -p userdata
3204 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
3205 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
3206 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
3207 +fi
3208 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
3209 +exec chromium \
3210 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
3211 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
3212 EOF
3213 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
3214 </pre>
3215
3216 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3217 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3218 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3219
3220       </div>
3221       <div class="tags">
3222
3223
3224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3225
3226
3227       </div>
3228     </div>
3229     <div class="padding"></div>
3230
3231     <div class="entry">
3232       <div class="title">
3233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
3234       </div>
3235       <div class="date">
3236          7th October 2016
3237       </div>
3238       <div class="body">
3239         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
3240 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
3241 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
3242 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
3243 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
3244 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
3245 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
3246 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
3247 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
3248 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
3249 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
3250 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
3251 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
3252
3253 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
3254 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
3255 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
3256 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
3257 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
3258 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
3259
3260 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
3261 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
3262 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
3263 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
3264 identifiers.</p>
3265
3266 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
3267 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
3268 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
3269 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
3270 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
3271 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
3272 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
3273 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
3274 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
3275 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
3276 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
3277 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
3278 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
3279 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
3280
3281 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
3282 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
3283 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
3284 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
3285 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
3286 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
3287 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
3288
3289 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
3290 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
3291 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
3292 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
3293 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
3294 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
3295 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
3296 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
3297 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
3298 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
3299 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
3300 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
3301 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
3302 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
3303 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
3304 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
3305 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
3306
3307 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
3308 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
3309 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
3310 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
3311 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
3312 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
3313 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
3314
3315 <p><pre>
3316 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
3317     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
3318 </pre></p>
3319
3320 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
3321 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
3322 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
3323 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
3324 to detect this?</p>
3325
3326 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
3327 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
3328 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
3329 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
3330 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
3331 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
3332 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
3333 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
3334 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
3335 directly if no such class exist.</p>
3336
3337 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3338 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
3339 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
3340
3341 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
3342 please join us on our IRC channel
3343 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
3344 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
3345 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
3346 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
3347
3348 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3349 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3350 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3351
3352       </div>
3353       <div class="tags">
3354
3355
3356         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
3357
3358
3359       </div>
3360     </div>
3361     <div class="padding"></div>
3362
3363     <div class="entry">
3364       <div class="title">
3365         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
3366       </div>
3367       <div class="date">
3368         30th August 2016
3369       </div>
3370       <div class="body">
3371         <p>In April we
3372 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
3373 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
3374 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
3375 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
3376 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
3377 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
3378 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
3379 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
3380 contributing using
3381 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3382 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3383 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3384 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3385 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3386 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
3387 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
3388
3389 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
3390 electronic form.</p>
3391
3392       </div>
3393       <div class="tags">
3394
3395
3396         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3397
3398
3399       </div>
3400     </div>
3401     <div class="padding"></div>
3402
3403     <div class="entry">
3404       <div class="title">
3405         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
3406       </div>
3407       <div class="date">
3408         11th August 2016
3409       </div>
3410       <div class="body">
3411         <p>This summer, I read a great article
3412 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
3413 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
3414 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
3415 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
3416 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
3417 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
3418 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
3419 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
3420 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
3421 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
3422 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
3423 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
3424
3425 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
3426 get the system into Debian.  I
3427 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
3428 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
3429 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
3430 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
3431 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
3432 profiling information included in the source package.
3433 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
3434
3435 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
3436 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
3437
3438 <p><blockquote><pre>
3439 coz run --- program-to-run
3440 </pre></blockquote></p>
3441
3442 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
3443 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
3444 most, use a web browser and either point it to
3445 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
3446 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
3447 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
3448 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
3449 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
3450 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
3451 targeted experiments.</p>
3452
3453 <p>A video published by ACM
3454 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
3455 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
3456 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
3457 titled
3458 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
3459 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
3460
3461 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
3462 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
3463 because it uses a
3464 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
3465 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
3466 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
3467 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
3468
3469 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
3470 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
3471 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
3472 C++ libraries.</p>
3473
3474       </div>
3475       <div class="tags">
3476
3477
3478         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3479
3480
3481       </div>
3482     </div>
3483     <div class="padding"></div>
3484
3485     <div class="entry">
3486       <div class="title">
3487         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
3488       </div>
3489       <div class="date">
3490          5th August 2016
3491       </div>
3492       <div class="body">
3493         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
3494 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
3495 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
3496 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
3497 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
3498 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
3499 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
3500 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
3501 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
3502 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
3503 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
3504 Commons is needed.</p>
3505
3506 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
3507 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
3508 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
3509 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
3510 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
3511 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
3512
3513 <table border="0">
3514 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
3515 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
3516 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
3517 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
3518 </table>
3519
3520 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
3521 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
3522 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
3523 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
3524 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
3525 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
3526 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
3527 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
3528 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
3529 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
3530 as much as I did.</p>
3531
3532 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
3533 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
3534
3535 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
3536 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
3537 touch.</p>
3538
3539       </div>
3540       <div class="tags">
3541
3542
3543         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>.
3544
3545
3546       </div>
3547     </div>
3548     <div class="padding"></div>
3549
3550     <div class="entry">
3551       <div class="title">
3552         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
3553       </div>
3554       <div class="date">
3555          1st August 2016
3556       </div>
3557       <div class="body">
3558         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
3559 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
3560 broadcasting talks by or about
3561 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
3562 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
3563 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
3564 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
3565 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
3566 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
3567 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
3568 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
3569 using only free software (all of it
3570 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
3571 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
3572
3573 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
3574 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
3575 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
3576 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
3577 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
3578 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
3579 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
3580 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
3581 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
3582 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
3583 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
3584 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
3585 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
3586 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
3587 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
3588 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
3589 presentations.</p>
3590
3591 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
3592 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
3593 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
3594 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
3595 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
3596
3597       </div>
3598       <div class="tags">
3599
3600
3601         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>.
3602
3603
3604       </div>
3605     </div>
3606     <div class="padding"></div>
3607
3608     <div class="entry">
3609       <div class="title">
3610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
3611       </div>
3612       <div class="date">
3613          7th July 2016
3614       </div>
3615       <div class="body">
3616         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
3617 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
3618 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
3619 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
3620 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
3621 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
3622 microphone The initial idea had been to just
3623 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
3624 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
3625 until a few days ago.</p>
3626
3627 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
3628 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
3629 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
3630 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
3631 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
3632 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
3633 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
3634
3635 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
3636 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
3637 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
3638 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
3639 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
3640 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
3641 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
3642 him.</p>
3643
3644 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
3645 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
3646 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
3647 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
3648 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
3649 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
3650 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
3651 devices it would work for.</p>
3652
3653 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
3654 followed some instructions
3655 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
3656 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
3657 machine with Debian testing:</p>
3658
3659 <p><pre>
3660 adb reboot-bootloader
3661 fastboot oem rebootRUU
3662 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3663 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3664 fastboot reboot
3665 </pre></p>
3666
3667 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
3668 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
3669 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
3670 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
3671 too.</p>
3672
3673 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
3674 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
3675 like this:</p>
3676
3677 <p><pre>
3678 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
3679 </pre>
3680
3681 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
3682 this:</p>
3683
3684 <p><pre>
3685 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
3686 </pre></p>
3687
3688 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
3689 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
3690 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
3691 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
3692 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
3693
3694       </div>
3695       <div class="tags">
3696
3697
3698         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3699
3700
3701       </div>
3702     </div>
3703     <div class="padding"></div>
3704
3705     <div class="entry">
3706       <div class="title">
3707         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
3708       </div>
3709       <div class="date">
3710          3rd July 2016
3711       </div>
3712       <div class="body">
3713         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
3714 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
3715 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
3716 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
3717 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
3718 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
3719 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
3720 Github source, compared it to the source in
3721 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
3722 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
3723 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
3724 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
3725 the recipe how I did it.</p>
3726
3727 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
3728
3729 <pre>
3730 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
3731 </pre>
3732
3733 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
3734 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
3735
3736 <pre>
3737 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
3738 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
3739 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
3740 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
3741 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
3742          });
3743      });
3744
3745 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
3746 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
3747 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
3748 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
3749      var messageReceiver;
3750      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
3751          if (messageReceiver) {
3752 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
3753 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
3754 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
3755 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
3756  ;(function() {
3757      'use strict';
3758 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
3759 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
3760
3761      window.extension = window.extension || {};
3762
3763 EOF
3764 </pre>
3765
3766 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
3767 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
3768 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
3769 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
3770
3771 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
3772 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
3773
3774 <pre>
3775 #!/bin/sh
3776 cd $(dirname $0)
3777 mkdir -p userdata
3778 exec chromium \
3779   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
3780   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
3781 </pre>
3782
3783 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
3784 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
3785 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
3786 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
3787 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
3788
3789 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
3790 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
3791 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
3792 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
3793 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
3794 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
3795 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
3796 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
3797 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
3798 Signal from my laptop.
3799
3800 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
3801 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
3802 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
3803 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
3804 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
3805 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
3806 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
3807 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
3808 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
3809 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
3810 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
3811 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
3812
3813 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
3814 on this topic in
3815 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
3816 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
3817 phone</a>.</p>
3818
3819       </div>
3820       <div class="tags">
3821
3822
3823         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3824
3825
3826       </div>
3827     </div>
3828     <div class="padding"></div>
3829
3830     <div class="entry">
3831       <div class="title">
3832         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
3833       </div>
3834       <div class="date">
3835          6th June 2016
3836       </div>
3837       <div class="body">
3838         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
3839 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
3840 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
3841 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
3842 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
3843 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
3844 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
3845 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
3846 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
3847
3848 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
3849 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
3850 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
3851 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
3852 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
3853 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
3854 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
3855
3856 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
3857 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
3858 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
3859 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
3860 toten and parole.</p>
3861
3862 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
3863 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
3864 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
3865 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
3866 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
3867 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
3868 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
3869 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
3870 formats.</p>
3871
3872       </div>
3873       <div class="tags">
3874
3875
3876         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>.
3877
3878
3879       </div>
3880     </div>
3881     <div class="padding"></div>
3882
3883     <div class="entry">
3884       <div class="title">
3885         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
3886       </div>
3887       <div class="date">
3888          5th June 2016
3889       </div>
3890       <div class="body">
3891         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
3892 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
3893 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
3894 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
3895 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
3896 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
3897 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
3898 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
3899 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
3900 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
3901 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
3902 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
3903 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
3904 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
3905 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
3906 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
3907 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
3908 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
3909 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
3910 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
3911
3912 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
3913 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
3914 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
3915 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
3916 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
3917 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
3918 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
3919 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
3920 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
3921 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
3922 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
3923 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
3924 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
3925 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
3926
3927 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
3928 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
3929 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
3930 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
3931 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
3932 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
3933 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
3934 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
3935
3936 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
3937 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
3938 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
3939 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
3940 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
3941 information is collected from
3942 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
3943 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
3944 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
3945 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
3946 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
3947 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
3948 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
3949 type (preferably
3950 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
3951 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
3952 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
3953 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
3954
3955 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
3956 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
3957 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
3958
3959 <p><blockquote><pre>
3960 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3961 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
3962   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
3963     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
3964     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
3965     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
3966   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
3967 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
3968 </pre></blockquote></p>
3969
3970 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
3971 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
3972 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
3973 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
3974
3975 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
3976 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
3977 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
3978
3979 <p><blockquote><pre>
3980 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
3981 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
3982 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
3983 %
3984 </pre></blockquote></p>
3985
3986 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
3987 MimeType= line.</p>
3988
3989 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
3990 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
3991 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
3992 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
3993 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
3994 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
3995 fixed. :)</p>
3996
3997       </div>
3998       <div class="tags">
3999
4000
4001         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4002
4003
4004       </div>
4005     </div>
4006     <div class="padding"></div>
4007
4008     <div class="entry">
4009       <div class="title">
4010         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
4011       </div>
4012       <div class="date">
4013         28th May 2016
4014       </div>
4015       <div class="body">
4016         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
4017 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
4018 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
4019 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
4020 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
4021 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
4022 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
4023 currently publishes its talks.  You can
4024 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
4025 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
4026 on demand page for the talk
4027 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
4028 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
4029
4030 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
4031 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
4032
4033 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
4034   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
4035 </video></p>
4036
4037 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
4038 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
4039
4040       </div>
4041       <div class="tags">
4042
4043
4044         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>.
4045
4046
4047       </div>
4048     </div>
4049     <div class="padding"></div>
4050
4051     <div class="entry">
4052       <div class="title">
4053         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
4054       </div>
4055       <div class="date">
4056         25th May 2016
4057       </div>
4058       <div class="body">
4059         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
4060 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
4061 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
4062 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
4063 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
4064 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
4065 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
4066 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
4067 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
4068 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
4069 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
4070 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
4071
4072 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
4073 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
4074 is going away and is generally being replaced by
4075 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
4076 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
4077 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
4078 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
4079 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
4080 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
4081 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
4082 and see if it is recognised.</p>
4083
4084 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
4085 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
4086 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
4087
4088 <p><blockquote><pre>
4089 % isenkram-lookup
4090 bluez
4091 cheese
4092 fprintd
4093 fprintd-demo
4094 gkrellm-thinkbat
4095 hdapsd
4096 libpam-fprintd
4097 pidgin-blinklight
4098 thinkfan
4099 tleds
4100 tp-smapi-dkms
4101 tp-smapi-source
4102 tpb
4103 %p
4104 </pre></blockquote></p>
4105
4106 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
4107 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
4108 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
4109 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
4110 See
4111 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
4112 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
4113
4114       </div>
4115       <div class="tags">
4116
4117
4118         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
4119
4120
4121       </div>
4122     </div>
4123     <div class="padding"></div>
4124
4125     <div class="entry">
4126       <div class="title">
4127         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
4128       </div>
4129       <div class="date">
4130         23rd May 2016
4131       </div>
4132       <div class="body">
4133         <p>Yesterday I updated the
4134 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
4135 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
4136 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
4137 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
4138 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
4139 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
4140 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
4141 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
4142 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
4143 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
4144
4145 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
4146 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
4147 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
4148 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
4149 capacity.</p>
4150
4151 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
4152
4153 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
4154 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
4155 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
4156 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
4157
4158 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
4159
4160 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
4161 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
4162 shrinking. :(</p>
4163
4164 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
4165 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
4166 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
4167 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
4168 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
4169 machine.</p>
4170
4171 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
4172 check out the
4173 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
4174 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
4175 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
4176 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4177 Patches are very welcome.</p>
4178
4179 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4180 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4181 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4182
4183       </div>
4184       <div class="tags">
4185
4186
4187         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4188
4189
4190       </div>
4191     </div>
4192     <div class="padding"></div>
4193
4194     <div class="entry">
4195       <div class="title">
4196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
4197       </div>
4198       <div class="date">
4199         21st May 2016
4200       </div>
4201       <div class="body">
4202         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
4203 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
4204 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
4205 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
4206 ($19.99),
4207 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
4208 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
4209 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
4210 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
4211 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
4212 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
4213 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
4214 less).</p>
4215
4216 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
4217 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
4218 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
4219 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
4220 the paperback edition, they are
4221 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
4222 from github</a>.</p>
4223
4224       </div>
4225       <div class="tags">
4226
4227
4228         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>.
4229
4230
4231       </div>
4232     </div>
4233     <div class="padding"></div>
4234
4235     <div class="entry">
4236       <div class="title">
4237         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
4238       </div>
4239       <div class="date">
4240         19th May 2016
4241       </div>
4242       <div class="body">
4243         <p>I just donated to the
4244 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
4245 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
4246 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
4247 me will do the same.</p>
4248
4249 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
4250 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
4251 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
4252 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
4253 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
4254 make me worried.</p>
4255
4256 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
4257 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
4258 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
4259 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
4260 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
4261 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
4262 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
4263 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
4264 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
4265 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
4266 holders permissions.</p>
4267
4268 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
4269 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
4270 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
4271 and
4272 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
4273 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
4274 on
4275 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
4276 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
4277 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
4278 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
4279 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
4280 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
4281
4282 <p>I
4283 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
4284 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
4285 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
4286 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
4287 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
4288 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
4289 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
4290 those that want to support the request.</p>
4291
4292 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
4293 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
4294 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
4295 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
4296 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
4297
4298       </div>
4299       <div class="tags">
4300
4301
4302         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4303
4304
4305       </div>
4306     </div>
4307     <div class="padding"></div>
4308
4309     <div class="entry">
4310       <div class="title">
4311         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
4312       </div>
4313       <div class="date">
4314         12th May 2016
4315       </div>
4316       <div class="body">
4317         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
4318 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
4319 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
4320 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
4321 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
4322 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4323 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
4324 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
4325 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
4326 great if you could help out with
4327 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
4328 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
4329
4330       </div>
4331       <div class="tags">
4332
4333
4334         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4335
4336
4337       </div>
4338     </div>
4339     <div class="padding"></div>
4340
4341     <div class="entry">
4342       <div class="title">
4343         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
4344       </div>
4345       <div class="date">
4346          8th May 2016
4347       </div>
4348       <div class="body">
4349         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
4350 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
4351
4352 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
4353 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
4354 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
4355 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
4356 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
4357 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
4358 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
4359 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
4360 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
4361 players.</p>
4362
4363 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
4364 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
4365 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
4366 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
4367 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
4368 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
4369 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
4370 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
4371 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
4372 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
4373 support most file formats.</p>
4374
4375 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
4376 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
4377 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
4378 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
4379 listed first in the table.</p>
4380
4381 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
4382 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
4383 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
4384 support?</p>
4385
4386       </div>
4387       <div class="tags">
4388
4389
4390         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>.
4391
4392
4393       </div>
4394     </div>
4395     <div class="padding"></div>
4396
4397     <div class="entry">
4398       <div class="title">
4399         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
4400       </div>
4401       <div class="date">
4402          4th May 2016
4403       </div>
4404       <div class="body">
4405         A friend of mine made me aware of
4406 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
4407 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
4408 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
4409
4410 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
4411 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
4412 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
4413 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
4414 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
4415 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
4416 production started.</p>
4417
4418 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
4419 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
4420 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
4421
4422       </div>
4423       <div class="tags">
4424
4425
4426         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4427
4428
4429       </div>
4430     </div>
4431     <div class="padding"></div>
4432
4433     <div class="entry">
4434       <div class="title">
4435         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
4436       </div>
4437       <div class="date">
4438         18th April 2016
4439       </div>
4440       <div class="body">
4441         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
4442 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
4443 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
4444 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
4445 will
4446 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
4447 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
4448 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
4449 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
4450 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
4451 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
4452 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
4453 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
4454 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
4455 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
4456
4457       </div>
4458       <div class="tags">
4459
4460
4461         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4462
4463
4464       </div>
4465     </div>
4466     <div class="padding"></div>
4467
4468     <div class="entry">
4469       <div class="title">
4470         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
4471       </div>
4472       <div class="date">
4473         13th April 2016
4474       </div>
4475       <div class="body">
4476         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
4477 Schwarz on The Intercept
4478 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
4479 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
4480 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
4481 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
4482 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
4483 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
4484 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
4485 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
4486 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
4487 inspiring to read even today.</p>
4488
4489 <p><blockquote>
4490 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
4491 <br>- I. F. Stone
4492 </blockquote></p>
4493
4494 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
4495 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
4496 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
4497 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
4498 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
4499 check him out.</p>
4500
4501       </div>
4502       <div class="tags">
4503
4504
4505         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
4506
4507
4508       </div>
4509     </div>
4510     <div class="padding"></div>
4511
4512     <div class="entry">
4513       <div class="title">
4514         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
4515       </div>
4516       <div class="date">
4517         12th April 2016
4518       </div>
4519       <div class="body">
4520         <p>I'm happy to report that
4521 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
4522 French paperback edition</a> of
4523 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
4524 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
4525 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
4526 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
4527 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
4528 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
4529
4530 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
4531 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
4532 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
4533 available from
4534 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
4535 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
4536 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
4537 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
4538 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
4539 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
4540 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
4541
4542 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
4543 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
4544 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
4545 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
4546 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
4547 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
4548 that the revenue for these editions go to the
4549 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
4550 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
4551 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
4552 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
4553 and
4554 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4555 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
4556 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
4557 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
4558 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
4559
4560 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
4561 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
4562 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
4563 to make this happen.</p>
4564
4565       </div>
4566       <div class="tags">
4567
4568
4569         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>.
4570
4571
4572       </div>
4573     </div>
4574     <div class="padding"></div>
4575
4576     <div class="entry">
4577       <div class="title">
4578         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
4579       </div>
4580       <div class="date">
4581         10th April 2016
4582       </div>
4583       <div class="body">
4584         <p>During this weekends
4585 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
4586 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
4587 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
4588 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
4589 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
4590 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
4591 contributing using
4592 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
4593 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
4594 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
4595 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
4596 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
4597 contributors</a>.</p>
4598
4599 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
4600 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
4601 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
4602 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
4603 available for many more languages.</p>
4604
4605       </div>
4606       <div class="tags">
4607
4608
4609         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4610
4611
4612       </div>
4613     </div>
4614     <div class="padding"></div>
4615
4616     <div class="entry">
4617       <div class="title">
4618         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
4619       </div>
4620       <div class="date">
4621          7th April 2016
4622       </div>
4623       <div class="body">
4624         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
4625 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
4626 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
4627 But I might be wrong.</p>
4628
4629 <p>According to
4630 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
4631 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
4632 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
4633 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
4634 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
4635 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
4636 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
4637 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
4638 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
4639 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
4640
4641 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
4642 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
4643 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
4644 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
4645 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
4646 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
4647 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
4648 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4649 team status page</a>, and
4650 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
4651 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
4652
4653 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
4654 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
4655 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
4656 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
4657 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
4658 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
4659 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
4660 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
4661 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
4662 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
4663 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
4664 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
4665
4666       </div>
4667       <div class="tags">
4668
4669
4670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4671
4672
4673       </div>
4674     </div>
4675     <div class="padding"></div>
4676
4677     <div class="entry">
4678       <div class="title">
4679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
4680       </div>
4681       <div class="date">
4682          2nd April 2016
4683       </div>
4684       <div class="body">
4685         <p>Two years ago, I had
4686 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
4687 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
4688 other things noted a still open
4689 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
4690 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
4691 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
4692 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
4693 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
4694 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
4695 using only curl:</p>
4696
4697 <p><pre>
4698 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
4699   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
4700          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
4701 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
4702 </pre></p>
4703
4704 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
4705 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
4706 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
4707 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
4708 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
4709 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
4710 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
4711
4712 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
4713 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
4714 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
4715 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
4716 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
4717 service certificate.</p>
4718
4719 <p><pre>
4720 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
4721 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
4722 </pre></p>
4723
4724 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
4725 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
4726 Timestamping</a> and
4727 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
4728 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
4729 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
4730 Among the latter is
4731 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
4732 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
4733 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
4734 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
4735 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
4736 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
4737 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
4738 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
4739 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
4740 a document was created.</p>
4741
4742 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
4743 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
4744 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
4745 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
4746 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
4747 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
4748
4749 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
4750 searched, so I decided to try to
4751 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
4752 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
4753 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
4754 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
4755 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
4756 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
4757 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
4758 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
4759 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
4760 this:
4761
4762 <p><pre>
4763 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
4764 </pre></p>
4765
4766 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
4767 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
4768 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
4769 --verify option:</p>
4770
4771 <p><pre>
4772 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
4773 </pre></p>
4774
4775 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
4776 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
4777 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
4778 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
4779 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
4780 verification later.</p>
4781
4782 <p>Please check out
4783 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
4784 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
4785 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
4786 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
4787 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
4788
4789 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4790 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4791 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4792
4793       </div>
4794       <div class="tags">
4795
4796
4797         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>.
4798
4799
4800       </div>
4801     </div>
4802     <div class="padding"></div>
4803
4804     <div class="entry">
4805       <div class="title">
4806         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
4807       </div>
4808       <div class="date">
4809         23rd March 2016
4810       </div>
4811       <div class="body">
4812         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
4813 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
4814 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
4815 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
4816 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
4817 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
4818 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
4819 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
4820
4821 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
4822 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
4823 and lifetime prediction by running:
4824
4825 <p><pre>
4826 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
4827 </pre></p>
4828
4829 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
4830
4831 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
4832 entry yet):</p>
4833
4834 <p><pre>
4835 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
4836 </pre></p>
4837
4838 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
4839 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
4840 few years of data.</p>
4841
4842 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
4843 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
4844 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
4845 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
4846 know.  The issue is reported as
4847 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
4848 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
4849 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
4850 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
4851 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
4852
4853 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
4854 check out the
4855 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
4856 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
4857 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
4858 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4859 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
4860
4861       </div>
4862       <div class="tags">
4863
4864
4865         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4866
4867
4868       </div>
4869     </div>
4870     <div class="padding"></div>
4871
4872     <div class="entry">
4873       <div class="title">
4874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
4875       </div>
4876       <div class="date">
4877         19th March 2016
4878       </div>
4879       <div class="body">
4880         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
4881 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
4882 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
4883 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
4884 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
4885 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
4886 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
4887 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
4888 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
4889
4890 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
4891 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
4892 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
4893 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
4894 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
4895 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
4896 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
4897 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
4898 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
4899
4900 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
4901 {
4902  "vh":500.00,
4903  "vm":0,
4904  "vl":0,
4905  "uqr":1,
4906  "tp":1,
4907  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
4908  "cc":"NO",
4909  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
4910  "iref":"12300001",
4911  "idt":"20151022",
4912  "ddt":"20151105",
4913  "due":2500.0000,
4914  "cur":"NOK",
4915  "pt":"BBAN",
4916  "acc":"17202612345",
4917  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
4918  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
4919 }
4920 </pre></p>
4921
4922 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
4923 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
4924 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
4925 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
4926 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
4927 Norway.</p>
4928
4929 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
4930 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
4931 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
4932 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
4933 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
4934 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
4935 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
4936 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
4937 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
4938 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
4939 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
4940 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
4941 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
4942 with patents, there is always
4943 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
4944 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
4945
4946 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
4947 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
4948 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
4949 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
4950 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
4951 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
4952 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
4953 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
4954 maintain such specification.</p>
4955
4956 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
4957 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
4958 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
4959 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
4960 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
4961 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
4962 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
4963 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
4964 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
4965 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
4966 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
4967 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
4968 provide the payment information.  There is also the
4969 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
4970 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
4971 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
4972 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
4973 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
4974 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
4975 sets.</p>
4976
4977       </div>
4978       <div class="tags">
4979
4980
4981         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>.
4982
4983
4984       </div>
4985     </div>
4986     <div class="padding"></div>
4987
4988     <div class="entry">
4989       <div class="title">
4990         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
4991       </div>
4992       <div class="date">
4993         15th March 2016
4994       </div>
4995       <div class="body">
4996         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
4997 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
4998 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
4999 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
5000 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
5001 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
5002 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
5003 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
5004 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
5005 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
5006 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
5007
5008 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
5009 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
5010 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
5011 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
5012 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
5013 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
5014 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
5015 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
5016 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
5017 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
5018 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
5019
5020 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
5021
5022 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
5023 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
5024 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
5025 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
5026 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
5027 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
5028
5029 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
5030 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
5031 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
5032 and graphing.</p>
5033
5034 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
5035 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
5036 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
5037 on
5038 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5039 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
5040
5041       </div>
5042       <div class="tags">
5043
5044
5045         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5046
5047
5048       </div>
5049     </div>
5050     <div class="padding"></div>
5051
5052     <div class="entry">
5053       <div class="title">
5054         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
5055       </div>
5056       <div class="date">
5057         19th February 2016
5058       </div>
5059       <div class="body">
5060         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
5061 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
5062 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
5063 the code in the package in question, preferably in
5064 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
5065 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
5066
5067 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
5068 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
5069 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
5070 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
5071 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
5072 out what was wrong with
5073 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
5074 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
5075 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
5076 semi-automatically.</p>
5077
5078 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
5079 file based on the code in the source package,
5080 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
5081 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
5082 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
5083 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
5084 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
5085 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
5086 option in
5087 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
5088 blog posts from 2014</a>.
5089
5090 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
5091
5092 <p><pre>
5093 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
5094 </pre></p>
5095
5096 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
5097 this might not be the best option.</p>
5098
5099 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
5100 this approach in
5101 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
5102 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
5103 dpkg-copyright' option:
5104
5105 <p><pre>
5106 cme update dpkg-copyright
5107 </pre></p>
5108
5109 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
5110 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
5111
5112 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
5113 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
5114 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
5115 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
5116 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
5117 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
5118 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
5119 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
5120 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
5121 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
5122
5123 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
5124 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
5125 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
5126 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
5127
5128 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
5129 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
5130 planet.debian.org.</p>
5131
5132 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5133 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5134 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5135
5136 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
5137 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
5138
5139 <p><pre>
5140 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
5141   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
5142 </pre></p>
5143
5144 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
5145 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
5146 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
5147 with my packages in the future.</p>
5148
5149 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
5150 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
5151 command line.</p>
5152
5153       </div>
5154       <div class="tags">
5155
5156
5157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5158
5159
5160       </div>
5161     </div>
5162     <div class="padding"></div>
5163
5164     <div class="entry">
5165       <div class="title">
5166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
5167       </div>
5168       <div class="date">
5169          4th February 2016
5170       </div>
5171       <div class="body">
5172         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
5173 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
5174 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
5175 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
5176 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
5177 about. :)</p>
5178
5179 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
5180 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
5181 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
5182 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
5183 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
5184 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
5185
5186 <blockquote><pre>
5187 % apt install appstream
5188 [...]
5189 % apt update
5190 [...]
5191 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
5192   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5193 firmware-qlogic
5194 %
5195 </pre></blockquote>
5196
5197 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
5198 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
5199 a way appstream can use.</p>
5200
5201 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
5202 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
5203 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
5204 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
5205 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
5206 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
5207
5208 <blockquote><pre>
5209 % apt install appstream
5210 [...]
5211 % apt update
5212 [...]
5213 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
5214   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5215 bkchem
5216 phototonic
5217 inkscape
5218 shutter
5219 tetzle
5220 geeqie
5221 xia
5222 pinta
5223 gthumb
5224 karbon
5225 comix
5226 mirage
5227 viewnior
5228 postr
5229 ristretto
5230 kolourpaint4
5231 eog
5232 eom
5233 gimagereader
5234 midori
5235 %
5236 </pre></blockquote>
5237
5238 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
5239 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
5240
5241       </div>
5242       <div class="tags">
5243
5244
5245         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5246
5247
5248       </div>
5249     </div>
5250     <div class="padding"></div>
5251
5252     <div class="entry">
5253       <div class="title">
5254         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
5255       </div>
5256       <div class="date">
5257         24th January 2016
5258       </div>
5259       <div class="body">
5260         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
5261 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
5262 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
5263 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
5264 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
5265 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
5266 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
5267 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
5268 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
5269 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
5270 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
5271 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
5272 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
5273 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
5274 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
5275 entities.</p>
5276
5277 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
5278
5279 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
5280 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
5281 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
5282 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
5283 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
5284 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
5285 tool to do so is called
5286 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
5287 discovered it when I read
5288 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
5289 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
5290 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
5291 The python program was in Debian, but
5292 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
5293 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
5294 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
5295 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
5296 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
5297 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
5298 are now included
5299 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
5300
5301 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
5302 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
5303 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
5304 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
5305 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
5306 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
5307 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
5308 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
5309 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
5310 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
5311 about yourself with the services.</p>
5312
5313 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
5314 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
5315 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
5316 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
5317 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
5318 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
5319 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
5320 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
5321 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
5322 things.  A similar technique have been
5323 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
5324 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
5325 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
5326 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
5327 public.</p>
5328
5329 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
5330 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
5331 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
5332 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
5333
5334 <p>(I have uploaded
5335 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
5336 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
5337 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
5338
5339       </div>
5340       <div class="tags">
5341
5342
5343         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5344
5345
5346       </div>
5347     </div>
5348     <div class="padding"></div>
5349
5350     <div class="entry">
5351       <div class="title">
5352         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
5353       </div>
5354       <div class="date">
5355         15th January 2016
5356       </div>
5357       <div class="body">
5358         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
5359 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
5360 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
5361 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
5362 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
5363 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
5364 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
5365 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
5366 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
5367 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
5368 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
5369 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
5370 was not the first to propose this, as the
5371 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
5372 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
5373 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
5374 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
5375
5376 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
5377 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
5378 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
5379 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
5380 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
5381
5382 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
5383 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
5384 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
5385 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
5386 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
5387 done in /etc/.</p>
5388
5389 <blockquote><pre>
5390 apt install apt-transport-tor
5391 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5392 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5393 </pre></blockquote>
5394
5395 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
5396 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
5397 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
5398 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
5399
5400 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
5401 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
5402 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
5403 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
5404 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
5405 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
5406
5407 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
5408 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
5409 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
5410 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
5411 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
5412
5413 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
5414 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
5415 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
5416 system.</p>
5417
5418       </div>
5419       <div class="tags">
5420
5421
5422         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
5423
5424
5425       </div>
5426     </div>
5427     <div class="padding"></div>
5428
5429     <div class="entry">
5430       <div class="title">
5431         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
5432       </div>
5433       <div class="date">
5434         23rd December 2015
5435       </div>
5436       <div class="body">
5437         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
5438 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
5439 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
5440 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
5441 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
5442 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
5443
5444 <p>A few days I came across
5445 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
5446 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
5447 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
5448 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
5449 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
5450 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
5451 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
5452 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
5453 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
5454 discovered the developer
5455 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
5456 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
5457 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
5458 archive.</p>
5459
5460 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
5461 it into Debian, where it currently
5462 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
5463 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
5464
5465 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
5466 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
5467 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
5468 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
5469 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
5470 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
5471 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
5472 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
5473 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
5474 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
5475 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
5476 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
5477
5478 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
5479 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
5480 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
5481 package show up in unstable.</p>
5482
5483       </div>
5484       <div class="tags">
5485
5486
5487         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5488
5489
5490       </div>
5491     </div>
5492     <div class="padding"></div>
5493
5494     <div class="entry">
5495       <div class="title">
5496         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
5497       </div>
5498       <div class="date">
5499         20th December 2015
5500       </div>
5501       <div class="body">
5502         <p>Around three years ago, I created
5503 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
5504 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
5505 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
5506 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
5507 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
5508 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
5509 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
5510 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
5511 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
5512 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
5513 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
5514 with.</p>
5515
5516 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
5517 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
5518 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
5519 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
5520 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
5521 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
5522 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5523 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
5524 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
5525 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
5526 Debian version of appstream.</p>
5527
5528 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
5529 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
5530 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
5531 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
5532 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
5533 how do add the required
5534 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
5535 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
5536 this content:</p>
5537
5538 <blockquote><pre>
5539 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
5540 &lt;component&gt;
5541   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
5542   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
5543   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
5544   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
5545   &lt;description&gt;
5546     &lt;p&gt;
5547       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
5548       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
5549       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
5550       launcher.
5551     &lt;/p&gt;
5552   &lt;/description&gt;
5553   &lt;provides&gt;
5554     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
5555   &lt;/provides&gt;
5556 &lt;/component&gt;
5557 </pre></blockquote>
5558
5559 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
5560 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
5561 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
5562 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
5563 0202.</p>
5564
5565 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
5566 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
5567 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
5568 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
5569 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
5570 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
5571 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
5572 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
5573
5574 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
5575 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
5576 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
5577 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
5578 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
5579
5580 <blockquote><pre>
5581 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
5582 </pre></blockquote>
5583
5584 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
5585 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
5586 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
5587 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
5588 question.</p>
5589
5590 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
5591 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
5592
5593 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
5594 try running this command on the command line:</p>
5595
5596 <blockquote><pre>
5597 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
5598 </pre></blockquote>
5599
5600 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
5601 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
5602 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
5603
5604       </div>
5605       <div class="tags">
5606
5607
5608         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
5609
5610
5611       </div>
5612     </div>
5613     <div class="padding"></div>
5614
5615     <div class="entry">
5616       <div class="title">
5617         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
5618       </div>
5619       <div class="date">
5620         30th November 2015
5621       </div>
5622       <div class="body">
5623         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
5624 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
5625 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
5626 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
5627 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
5628
5629 <blockquote>
5630
5631 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
5632
5633 <blockquote>
5634 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
5635
5636 The first step is to choose a
5637 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
5638 code.<br/>
5639
5640 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
5641 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
5642
5643 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
5644 work<br/>
5645
5646 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
5647 </blockquote>
5648
5649 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
5650 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
5651 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
5652 0x57</a></small></p>
5653
5654 <p>As the Debian Website
5655 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
5656 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
5657 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
5658 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
5659 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
5660 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
5661 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
5662 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
5663 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
5664 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
5665 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
5666 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
5667 Freedom">FaiF</a>
5668 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
5669 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
5670 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
5671 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
5672 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
5673 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
5674 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
5675 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
5676 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
5677 In March the SFC supported a
5678 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
5679 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
5680 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
5681 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
5682 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
5683 conferences
5684 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
5685 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
5686 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
5687 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
5688 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
5689 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
5690 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
5691 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
5692 Software.</p>
5693
5694 <p>If you support Free Software,
5695 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
5696 what the SFC do, agree with their
5697 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
5698 principles</a>, are happy about their
5699 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
5700 work on a project that is an SFC
5701 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
5702 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
5703 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
5704 Allan Webber</a>,
5705 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
5706 Smith</a>,
5707 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
5708 Bacon</a>, myself and
5709 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
5710 becoming a
5711 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
5712 next week your donation will be
5713 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
5714 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
5715 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
5716 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
5717 social media accounts.</p>
5718
5719 </blockquote>
5720
5721 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
5722 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
5723 supporter too?</p>
5724
5725       </div>
5726       <div class="tags">
5727
5728
5729         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
5730
5731
5732       </div>
5733     </div>
5734     <div class="padding"></div>
5735
5736     <div class="entry">
5737       <div class="title">
5738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
5739       </div>
5740       <div class="date">
5741         17th November 2015
5742       </div>
5743       <div class="body">
5744         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
5745 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
5746 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
5747 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
5748 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
5749 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
5750 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
5751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
5752 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
5753 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
5754
5755 <pre>
5756 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
5757       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
5758 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
5759 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
5760 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5761 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5762 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5763 </pre>
5764
5765 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
5766 my old key.</p>
5767
5768 <p>If you signed my old key
5769 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
5770 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
5771 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
5772 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
5773
5774       </div>
5775       <div class="tags">
5776
5777
5778         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
5779
5780
5781       </div>
5782     </div>
5783     <div class="padding"></div>
5784
5785     <div class="entry">
5786       <div class="title">
5787         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
5788       </div>
5789       <div class="date">
5790          3rd November 2015
5791       </div>
5792       <div class="body">
5793         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
5794 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
5795 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
5796 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
5797 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
5798 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
5799 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
5800 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
5801 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
5802 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
5803 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
5804 journal entries .</p>
5805
5806 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
5807 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
5808 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
5809 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
5810 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
5811 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
5812 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
5813 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
5814 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
5815 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
5816 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
5817 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
5818 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
5819 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
5820 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
5821 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
5822 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
5823 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
5824 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
5825 ended,
5826 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
5827 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
5828 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
5829 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
5830 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
5831 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
5832 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
5833 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
5834 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
5835 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
5836 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
5837 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
5838 Geneva.</p>
5839
5840 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
5841 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
5842 over now.  This time
5843 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
5844 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
5845 receiver</a> and
5846 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
5847 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
5848 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
5849 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
5850 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
5851 different clause
5852 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
5853 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
5854 content of the document from the public because it contained
5855 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
5856 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
5857 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
5858 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
5859 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
5860 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
5861 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
5862 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
5863 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
5864 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
5865 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
5866
5867 <p>Armed with this
5868 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
5869 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
5870 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
5871 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
5872 the document.  According to
5873 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
5874 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
5875 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
5876 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
5877 the report initially and
5878 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
5879 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
5880 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
5881 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
5882 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
5883 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
5884 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
5885 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
5886 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
5887 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
5888 same person as the author of the document.</p>
5889
5890 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
5891 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
5892 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
5893 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
5894 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
5895 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
5896 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
5897 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
5898
5899 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
5900 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
5901
5902       </div>
5903       <div class="tags">
5904
5905
5906         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
5907
5908
5909       </div>
5910     </div>
5911     <div class="padding"></div>
5912
5913     <div class="entry">
5914       <div class="title">
5915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
5916       </div>
5917       <div class="date">
5918         31st October 2015
5919       </div>
5920       <div class="body">
5921         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
5922 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
5923 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
5924 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
5925 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
5926 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
5927 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
5928 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
5929 get the book in different formats:</p>
5930
5931 <ul>
5932
5933   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
5934     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
5935
5936   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
5937     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5938
5939   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
5940     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5941
5942   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
5943     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5944
5945 </ul>
5946
5947 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
5948 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
5949 have several problems according to
5950 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
5951 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
5952 create the book in various forms are available from
5953 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
5954 github project page</a>.</p>
5955
5956 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
5957 digi.no.  Check out the article
5958 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
5959 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
5960
5961 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
5962 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
5963 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
5964
5965       </div>
5966       <div class="tags">
5967
5968
5969         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>.
5970
5971
5972       </div>
5973     </div>
5974     <div class="padding"></div>
5975
5976     <div class="entry">
5977       <div class="title">
5978         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
5979       </div>
5980       <div class="date">
5981         23rd October 2015
5982       </div>
5983       <div class="body">
5984         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
5985 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
5986
5987 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
5988 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
5989 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
5990 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
5991 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
5992 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
5993 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
5994 would read it too.</p>
5995
5996 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
5997 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
5998 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
5999 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
6000 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
6001 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
6002 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
6003 this edition
6004 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
6005 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
6006 is the cover:
6007
6008 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
6009
6010 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
6011 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
6012 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
6013 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
6014 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
6015 need some proof reading.</p>
6016
6017 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
6018 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
6019 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
6020 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
6021 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
6022 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
6023 and
6024 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
6025 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
6026 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
6027 have available.</p>
6028
6029 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
6030 to secure some sponsoring from
6031 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
6032 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
6033 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
6034 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
6035 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
6036
6037       </div>
6038       <div class="tags">
6039
6040
6041         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>.
6042
6043
6044       </div>
6045     </div>
6046     <div class="padding"></div>
6047
6048     <div class="entry">
6049       <div class="title">
6050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
6051       </div>
6052       <div class="date">
6053         19th October 2015
6054       </div>
6055       <div class="body">
6056         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
6057 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
6058 one hour interview was
6059 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
6060 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
6061 place 2014-10-20.</p>
6062
6063 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
6064 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
6065 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
6066
6067 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
6068
6069 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
6070 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
6071 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
6072 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
6073 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
6074 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
6075 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
6076 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
6077
6078       </div>
6079       <div class="tags">
6080
6081
6082         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>.
6083
6084
6085       </div>
6086     </div>
6087     <div class="padding"></div>
6088
6089     <div class="entry">
6090       <div class="title">
6091         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
6092       </div>
6093       <div class="date">
6094          8th October 2015
6095       </div>
6096       <div class="body">
6097         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
6098 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
6099 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
6100 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
6101 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
6102 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
6103 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
6104 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
6105 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
6106 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
6107 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
6108 weep.</p>
6109
6110 <p>The movie is also available on
6111 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
6112 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
6113 my parents.</p>
6114
6115       </div>
6116       <div class="tags">
6117
6118
6119         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>.
6120
6121
6122       </div>
6123     </div>
6124     <div class="padding"></div>
6125
6126     <div class="entry">
6127       <div class="title">
6128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
6129       </div>
6130       <div class="date">
6131          1st October 2015
6132       </div>
6133       <div class="body">
6134         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
6135 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
6136 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
6137 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
6138 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
6139 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
6140 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
6141 French translation available from the
6142 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
6143 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
6144 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
6145 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
6146 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
6147 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
6148 edition, check out
6149 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
6150 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
6151 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
6152 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
6153
6154       </div>
6155       <div class="tags">
6156
6157
6158         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>.
6159
6160
6161       </div>
6162     </div>
6163     <div class="padding"></div>
6164
6165     <div class="entry">
6166       <div class="title">
6167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
6168       </div>
6169       <div class="date">
6170         24th September 2015
6171       </div>
6172       <div class="body">
6173         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
6174 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
6175 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
6176 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
6177 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
6178 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
6179 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
6180
6181 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
6182
6183 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
6184 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
6185 by someone else.  I found
6186 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
6187 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
6188 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
6189 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
6190 from him.  Via
6191 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
6192 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
6193 discovered
6194 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
6195 available in Debian.</p>
6196
6197 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
6198 battery stats ever since. Now my
6199 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
6200 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
6201 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
6202 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
6203
6204 <pre>
6205 #!/bin/sh
6206 # Inspired by
6207 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
6208 # See also
6209 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
6210 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
6211
6212 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
6213     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
6214
6215 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
6216     (
6217         printf "timestamp,"
6218         for f in $files; do
6219             printf "%s," $f
6220         done
6221         echo
6222     ) > "$logfile"
6223 fi
6224
6225 log_battery() {
6226     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
6227     # when several log processes run in parallel.
6228     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
6229         for f in $files; do \
6230             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
6231         done)
6232     echo "$msg"
6233 }
6234
6235 cd /sys/class/power_supply
6236
6237 for bat in BAT*; do
6238     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
6239 done
6240 </pre>
6241
6242 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
6243 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
6244 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
6245 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
6246 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
6247 The code for the Debian package
6248 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
6249 available on github</a>.</p>
6250
6251 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
6252
6253 <pre>
6254 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
6255 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
6256 [...]
6257 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6258 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6259 </pre>
6260
6261 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
6262 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
6263 battery.</p>
6264
6265 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
6266 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
6267 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
6268 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
6269 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
6270 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
6271 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
6272 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
6273 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
6274 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
6275 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
6276 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
6277 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
6278 Linux too.</p>
6279
6280 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
6281 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
6282 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
6283 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
6284 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
6285 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
6286 load).</p>
6287
6288 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
6289 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
6290 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
6291 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
6292 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
6293 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
6294 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
6295 those.</p>
6296
6297 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
6298 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
6299 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
6300 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
6301 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
6302 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
6303 specific.</p>
6304
6305       </div>
6306       <div class="tags">
6307
6308
6309         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6310
6311
6312       </div>
6313     </div>
6314     <div class="padding"></div>
6315
6316     <div class="entry">
6317       <div class="title">
6318         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
6319       </div>
6320       <div class="date">
6321          3rd September 2015
6322       </div>
6323       <div class="body">
6324         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
6325 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
6326 the
6327 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
6328 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
6329 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
6330 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
6331
6332 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
6333 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
6334 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
6335 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
6336 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
6337 version.  Not only did he create a
6338 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
6339 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
6340 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
6341 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
6342 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
6343 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
6344 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
6345 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
6346 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
6347 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
6348
6349 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
6350 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
6351 current english version look like this:</p>
6352
6353 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
6354
6355 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
6356 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
6357 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
6358 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
6359 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
6360
6361 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
6362 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
6363 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
6364 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
6365 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
6366 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
6367
6368       </div>
6369       <div class="tags">
6370
6371
6372         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>.
6373
6374
6375       </div>
6376     </div>
6377     <div class="padding"></div>
6378
6379     <div class="entry">
6380       <div class="title">
6381         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
6382       </div>
6383       <div class="date">
6384         19th August 2015
6385       </div>
6386       <div class="body">
6387         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
6388 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
6389 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
6390 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
6391 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
6392 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
6393 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
6394 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
6395 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
6396 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
6397 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
6398 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
6399 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
6400 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
6401 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
6402 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
6403 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
6404
6405 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
6406 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
6407 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
6408 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
6409 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
6410 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
6411
6412       </div>
6413       <div class="tags">
6414
6415
6416         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>.
6417
6418
6419       </div>
6420     </div>
6421     <div class="padding"></div>
6422
6423     <div class="entry">
6424       <div class="title">
6425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
6426       </div>
6427       <div class="date">
6428          9th August 2015
6429       </div>
6430       <div class="body">
6431         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
6432 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
6433 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
6434 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
6435 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
6436 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
6437 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
6438 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
6439 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
6440
6441 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
6442 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
6443 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
6444 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
6445 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
6446
6447 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
6448 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
6449 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
6450 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
6451 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
6452 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
6453
6454 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
6455 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
6456 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
6457 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
6458 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
6459 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
6460 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
6461 bring the prize down further.</p>
6462
6463 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
6464 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
6465 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
6466 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
6467 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
6468 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
6469 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
6470 to the task.</p>
6471
6472 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
6473 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
6474 status can as usual be found on
6475 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6476 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
6477 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
6478 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
6479 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
6480 formatting.</p>
6481
6482 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
6483 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
6484 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
6485 result in a few months.</p>
6486
6487       </div>
6488       <div class="tags">
6489
6490
6491         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>.
6492
6493
6494       </div>
6495     </div>
6496     <div class="padding"></div>
6497
6498     <div class="entry">
6499       <div class="title">
6500         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
6501       </div>
6502       <div class="date">
6503         16th July 2015
6504       </div>
6505       <div class="body">
6506         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
6507 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
6508 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
6509 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
6510 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
6511 chapter.  Based on the
6512 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
6513 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
6514 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
6515 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
6516 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
6517 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
6518 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
6519 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
6520
6521 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
6522 and add this text there:</p>
6523
6524 <pre>
6525 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
6526 </pre>
6527
6528 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
6529 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
6530 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
6531
6532 <pre>
6533 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
6534 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
6535   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
6536     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
6537 \usepackage{endnotes}
6538 \let\footnote=\endnote
6539 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
6540 \begin{document}
6541     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
6542   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
6543 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
6544 </pre>
6545
6546 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
6547 this:</p>
6548
6549 <pre>
6550 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
6551 </pre>
6552
6553 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
6554 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
6555 book project</a> is located.</p>
6556
6557       </div>
6558       <div class="tags">
6559
6560
6561         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>.
6562
6563
6564       </div>
6565     </div>
6566     <div class="padding"></div>
6567
6568     <div class="entry">
6569       <div class="title">
6570         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
6571       </div>
6572       <div class="date">
6573          7th July 2015
6574       </div>
6575       <div class="body">
6576         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
6577 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
6578 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
6579 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
6580 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
6581 does not.</p>
6582
6583 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
6584 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
6585 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
6586 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
6587
6588 <p><blockquote>
6589
6590 <p>According to
6591 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
6592 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
6593 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
6594 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
6595 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
6596 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
6597
6598 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
6599 PDF named
6600 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
6601 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
6602 fees:</p>
6603
6604 <ul>
6605  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
6606   <ul>
6607    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
6608      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
6609      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
6610      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
6611
6612    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
6613      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
6614   </ul></li>
6615
6616  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
6617   <ul>
6618    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
6619      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
6620      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
6621
6622    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
6623      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
6624   </ul></li>
6625 </ul>
6626
6627 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
6628 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
6629 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
6630 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
6631 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
6632 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
6633
6634 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
6635 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
6636 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
6637 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
6638 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
6639 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
6640 access to personalized services?</p>
6641
6642 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
6643 Internet.</p>
6644 </blockquote></p>
6645
6646 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
6647 with the MPEG LA:</p>
6648
6649 <p><blockquote>
6650 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
6651 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
6652
6653 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
6654 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
6655 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
6656 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
6657 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
6658 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
6659 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
6660
6661 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
6662 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
6663 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
6664 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
6665 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
6666 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
6667 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
6668 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
6669 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
6670 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
6671 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
6672 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
6673
6674 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
6675 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
6676 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
6677 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
6678 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
6679 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
6680 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
6681
6682 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
6683 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
6684 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
6685 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
6686
6687 <p>For your reference, I have attached
6688 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
6689 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
6690 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
6691 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
6692 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
6693 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
6694 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
6695 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
6696 be used for execution.</p>
6697
6698 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
6699 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
6700 free to contact me directly.</p>
6701 </blockquote></p>
6702
6703 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
6704 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
6705 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
6706 But I still had a few questions:</p>
6707
6708 <p><blockquote>
6709 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
6710 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
6711 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
6712 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
6713 typically look similar to this:
6714
6715 <p><blockquote>
6716   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
6717   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
6718   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
6719   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
6720   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
6721   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
6722   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
6723   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
6724 </blockquote></p>
6725
6726 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
6727 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
6728 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
6729 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
6730 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
6731 </blockquote></p>
6732
6733 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
6734 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
6735
6736 <p><blockquote>
6737
6738 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
6739 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
6740 reads:</p>
6741
6742 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
6743 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
6744 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
6745 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
6746 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
6747 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
6748 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
6749 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
6750
6751 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
6752 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
6753 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
6754 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
6755 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
6756 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
6757 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
6758 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
6759
6760 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
6761 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
6762 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
6763 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
6764 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
6765 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
6766 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
6767 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
6768 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
6769
6770 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
6771 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
6772 Norway.</p>
6773
6774 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
6775 assistance, just let me know.</p>
6776 </blockquote></p>
6777
6778 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
6779 asked for more information:</p>
6780
6781 <p><blockquote>
6782
6783 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
6784 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
6785 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
6786 list available from &lt;URL:
6787 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
6788 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
6789 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
6790 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
6791 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
6792
6793 </blockquote></p>
6794
6795 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
6796 in that list:</p>
6797
6798 <p><blockquote>
6799
6800 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
6801 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
6802 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
6803 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
6804 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
6805 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
6806 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
6807 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
6808 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
6809
6810 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
6811 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
6812 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
6813 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
6814 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
6815 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
6816 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
6817 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
6818 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
6819 Portfolio Patents.</p>
6820 </blockquote></p>
6821
6822 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
6823 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
6824 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
6825 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
6826 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
6827 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
6828 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
6829 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
6830 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
6831
6832       </div>
6833       <div class="tags">
6834
6835
6836         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6837
6838
6839       </div>
6840     </div>
6841     <div class="padding"></div>
6842
6843     <div class="entry">
6844       <div class="title">
6845         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
6846       </div>
6847       <div class="date">
6848          5th July 2015
6849       </div>
6850       <div class="body">
6851         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
6852 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
6853 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
6854 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
6855 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
6856 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
6857 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
6858 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
6859 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
6860 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
6861 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
6862
6863 <p>One tip I got was to use the
6864 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
6865 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
6866 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
6867 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
6868 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
6869 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
6870
6871 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
6872 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
6873 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
6874 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
6875 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
6876 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
6877 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
6878 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
6879 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
6880 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
6881 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
6882 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
6883 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
6884 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
6885 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
6886
6887 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
6888 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
6889 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
6890 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
6891
6892 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
6893 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
6894
6895 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
6896 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
6897 different
6898 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
6899 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
6900
6901       </div>
6902       <div class="tags">
6903
6904
6905         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6906
6907
6908       </div>
6909     </div>
6910     <div class="padding"></div>
6911
6912     <div class="entry">
6913       <div class="title">
6914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
6915       </div>
6916       <div class="date">
6917          3rd July 2015
6918       </div>
6919       <div class="body">
6920         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
6921 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
6922 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
6923 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
6924 flickering.</p>
6925
6926 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
6927 still as
6928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
6929 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
6930 good help from
6931 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
6932 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
6933 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
6934 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
6935 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
6936 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
6937 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
6938 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
6939 deteriorated since X41.</p>
6940
6941 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
6942 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
6943 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
6944 have suggestions.</p>
6945
6946 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
6947 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
6948 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
6949
6950       </div>
6951       <div class="tags">
6952
6953
6954         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6955
6956
6957       </div>
6958     </div>
6959     <div class="padding"></div>
6960
6961     <div class="entry">
6962       <div class="title">
6963         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
6964       </div>
6965       <div class="date">
6966          2nd July 2015
6967       </div>
6968       <div class="body">
6969         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
6970 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
6971 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
6972 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
6973 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
6974 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
6975 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
6976 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
6977 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
6978 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
6979 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
6980 Youtube too</a>.</p>
6981
6982 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
6983 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
6984 pages</a> to view them.</p>
6985
6986 <ul>
6987
6988   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
6989       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
6990
6991   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
6992
6993   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
6994       (Olav Helland)</li>
6995
6996   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
6997       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
6998
6999   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
7000
7001   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
7002
7003   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
7004       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
7005
7006   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
7007
7008   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
7009
7010   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
7011
7012   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
7013
7014   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
7015       Sevens)</li>
7016
7017   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
7018       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
7019
7020   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
7021       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
7022
7023   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
7024       Dyvik)</li>
7025
7026   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
7027
7028 </ul>
7029
7030 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
7031 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
7032 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
7033 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
7034 which sent me on a detour to
7035 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
7036 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
7037 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
7038
7039       </div>
7040       <div class="tags">
7041
7042
7043         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>.
7044
7045
7046       </div>
7047     </div>
7048     <div class="padding"></div>
7049
7050     <div class="entry">
7051       <div class="title">
7052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
7053       </div>
7054       <div class="date">
7055         15th June 2015
7056       </div>
7057       <div class="body">
7058         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
7059 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
7060 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
7061 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
7062 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
7063 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
7064 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
7065 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
7066 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
7067
7068 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
7069 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
7070 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
7071 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
7072
7073 <pre>
7074 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
7075
7076 real    0m2.841s
7077 user    0m0.184s
7078 sys     0m0.036s
7079 %
7080 </pre>
7081
7082 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
7083 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
7084 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
7085 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
7086 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
7087
7088 <pre>
7089 digraph ownership {
7090 rankdir = LR;
7091 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
7092 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
7093 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
7094 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
7095 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
7096 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
7097 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
7098 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
7099 }
7100 </pre>
7101
7102 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
7103 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
7104 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
7105
7106 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
7107
7108 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
7109 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
7110 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
7111 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
7112 of the ownership links.</p>
7113
7114 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
7115 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
7116
7117 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
7118 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
7119 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
7120 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
7121 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
7122 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
7123 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
7124
7125       </div>
7126       <div class="tags">
7127
7128
7129         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
7130
7131
7132       </div>
7133     </div>
7134     <div class="padding"></div>
7135
7136     <div class="entry">
7137       <div class="title">
7138         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
7139       </div>
7140       <div class="date">
7141         11th June 2015
7142       </div>
7143       <div class="body">
7144         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
7145 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
7146 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
7147 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
7148 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
7149 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
7150 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
7151 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
7152 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
7153 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
7154 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
7155 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
7156 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
7157
7158 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
7159 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
7160 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
7161 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
7162 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
7163 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
7164 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
7165 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
7166 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
7167 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
7168
7169 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
7170 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
7171 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
7172 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
7173 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
7174 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
7175 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
7176 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
7177 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
7178
7179 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
7180 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
7181 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
7182 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
7183 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
7184 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
7185 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
7186 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
7187 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
7188 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
7189 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
7190
7191       </div>
7192       <div class="tags">
7193
7194
7195         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>.
7196
7197
7198       </div>
7199     </div>
7200     <div class="padding"></div>
7201
7202     <div class="entry">
7203       <div class="title">
7204         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
7205       </div>
7206       <div class="date">
7207         10th May 2015
7208       </div>
7209       <div class="body">
7210         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
7211 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
7212 criminal or not, are
7213 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
7214 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
7215 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
7216 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
7217 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
7218 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
7219 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
7220 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
7221 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
7222 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
7223 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
7224 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
7225 the police.</p>
7226
7227 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
7228 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
7229 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
7230 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
7231 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
7232 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
7233 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
7234 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
7235 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
7236 is good to know that
7237 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
7238 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
7239 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
7240 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
7241 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
7242 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
7243 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
7244 business getting access to that information.</p>
7245
7246 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
7247 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
7248 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
7249 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
7250 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
7251 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
7252 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
7253
7254 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
7255 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
7256 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
7257 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
7258
7259 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
7260 really could make such decision, I wrote
7261 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
7262 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
7263 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
7264
7265       </div>
7266       <div class="tags">
7267
7268
7269         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>.
7270
7271
7272       </div>
7273     </div>
7274     <div class="padding"></div>
7275
7276     <div class="entry">
7277       <div class="title">
7278         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
7279       </div>
7280       <div class="date">
7281          1st May 2015
7282       </div>
7283       <div class="body">
7284         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
7285 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
7286 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
7287 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
7288 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
7289 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
7290 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
7291
7292 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
7293 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
7294 the 2012 numbers are from
7295 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
7296 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
7297 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
7298 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
7299 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
7300
7301 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
7302 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
7303 enough.  See for example a
7304 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
7305 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
7306 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
7307 to get the storage requirements.</p>
7308
7309 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
7310 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
7311 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
7312 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
7313 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
7314
7315 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
7316 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
7317 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
7318 and large organisations:</p>
7319
7320 <table border="1">
7321 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
7322 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
7323 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
7324 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
7325 </table>
7326
7327 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
7328 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
7329 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
7330 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
7331 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
7332 collecting the data?</p>
7333
7334       </div>
7335       <div class="tags">
7336
7337
7338         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>.
7339
7340
7341       </div>
7342     </div>
7343     <div class="padding"></div>
7344
7345     <div class="entry">
7346       <div class="title">
7347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
7348       </div>
7349       <div class="date">
7350         26th April 2015
7351       </div>
7352       <div class="body">
7353         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
7354 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
7355 announcement today</a>:</p>
7356
7357 <pre>
7358 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
7359 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
7360 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
7361 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
7362
7363 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
7364 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
7365 later today ;)
7366
7367 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
7368 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
7369 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
7370 be possible and encouraged!
7371
7372 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
7373 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
7374
7375 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
7376 operating system for schools, universities and other
7377 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
7378 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
7379 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
7380 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
7381 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
7382 days.
7383
7384 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
7385 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
7386 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
7387 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
7388
7389 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7390 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7391 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
7392 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
7393 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
7394 least 5 characters!
7395
7396 == Where to download ==
7397
7398 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
7399 can be downloaded at the following locations:
7400
7401     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
7402     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
7403
7404 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
7405
7406 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
7407 available, with more software included (saving additional download
7408 time):
7409
7410     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
7411     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
7412
7413 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
7414
7415 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
7416 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
7417 options.
7418
7419 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
7420
7421 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
7422 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
7423
7424 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
7425 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
7426 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
7427 online version of the translated manual.
7428
7429 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
7430 release notes and the installation manual:
7431 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
7432 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
7433
7434
7435 == Errata / known problems ==
7436
7437     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
7438     DHCP (#780461).
7439
7440     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
7441
7442 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
7443 hostname immediately.
7444
7445 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
7446 more current and complete list.
7447
7448 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
7449
7450 === Software updates ===
7451
7452 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
7453
7454  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
7455    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
7456    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
7457
7458  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
7459    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
7460    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
7461    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
7462      the others see the manual.
7463  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
7464  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
7465  * GOsa 2.7.4
7466  * LTSP 5.5.4
7467  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
7468  * new boot framework: systemd
7469  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
7470  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
7471  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
7472  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
7473  * golearn 0.9
7474  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
7475  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7476  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
7477  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
7478    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
7479
7480 === Installation changes ===
7481
7482     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
7483     for the hardware present.
7484
7485 === Fixed bugs ===
7486
7487 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
7488 from a user perspective:
7489
7490  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7491    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7492    information is corrected (710362)
7493
7494  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
7495
7496 === Sugar desktop removed ===
7497
7498 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
7499 available in Debian Edu jessie.
7500
7501
7502 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
7503
7504 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
7505 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7506 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
7507 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7508 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7509 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7510 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7511 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
7512 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7513 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7514 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7515 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
7516 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7517 environment.
7518
7519 == About Debian ==
7520
7521 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7522 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7523 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7524 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7525 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
7526 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7527 operating system.
7528
7529 == Thanks ==
7530
7531 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
7532 You rock.
7533 </pre>
7534
7535       </div>
7536       <div class="tags">
7537
7538
7539         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7540
7541
7542       </div>
7543     </div>
7544     <div class="padding"></div>
7545
7546     <div class="entry">
7547       <div class="title">
7548         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
7549       </div>
7550       <div class="date">
7551         15th April 2015
7552       </div>
7553       <div class="body">
7554         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
7555 computer system for schools I've involved in,
7556 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
7557 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
7558 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
7559 Agarwal.</p>
7560
7561 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7562
7563 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
7564 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
7565 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
7566 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
7567 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
7568 few software start-ups as well.</p>
7569
7570 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7571 project?</strong></p>
7572
7573 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
7574 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
7575 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
7576 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
7577 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
7578 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
7579 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
7580
7581 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7582 Edu?</strong></p>
7583
7584 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
7585 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
7586 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
7587 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
7588 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
7589 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
7590 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
7591 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
7592
7593 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
7594 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
7595 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
7596 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
7597 for the developer per-se.</p>
7598
7599 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7600 Edu?</strong></p>
7601
7602 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
7603 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
7604 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
7605
7606 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
7607 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
7608 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
7609 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
7610 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
7611 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
7612 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
7613
7614 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
7615 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
7616 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
7617
7618 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
7619 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
7620 interactive manner. While sites such as the
7621 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
7622 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
7623 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
7624 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
7625 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
7626 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
7627 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
7628 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
7629 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
7630 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
7631 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
7632
7633 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
7634 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
7635 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
7636 also be used.</p>
7637
7638 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
7639 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
7640 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
7641 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
7642 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
7643 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
7644 the user's input.</p>
7645
7646 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
7647 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
7648 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
7649 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
7650 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
7651 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
7652 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
7653 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
7654
7655 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
7656 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
7657 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
7658 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
7659 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
7660 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
7661 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
7662 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
7663
7664 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7665
7666 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
7667 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
7668 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
7669 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
7670 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
7671
7672 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7673 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7674
7675 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
7676 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
7677 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
7678 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
7679 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
7680 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
7681
7682 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
7683 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
7684 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
7685 well.</p>
7686
7687 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
7688 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
7689 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
7690 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
7691
7692 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
7693 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
7694 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
7695 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
7696 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
7697 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
7698 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
7699 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
7700 releases.</p>
7701
7702 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
7703 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
7704 is aimed at.
7705
7706 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
7707 around 2 years, and
7708 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
7709 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
7710 there was :</p>
7711
7712 <ol>
7713
7714   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
7715    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
7716    portion/syllabus given.</li>
7717
7718   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
7719    is in the syllabus.</li>
7720
7721   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
7722    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
7723    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
7724    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
7725    as recognizable as say a
7726    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
7727    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
7728    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
7729    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
7730    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
7731    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
7732
7733 </ol>
7734
7735       </div>
7736       <div class="tags">
7737
7738
7739         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
7740
7741
7742       </div>
7743     </div>
7744     <div class="padding"></div>
7745
7746     <div class="entry">
7747       <div class="title">
7748         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
7749       </div>
7750       <div class="date">
7751          7th April 2015
7752       </div>
7753       <div class="body">
7754         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
7755 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
7756 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
7757
7758 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
7759 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
7760 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
7761 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
7762 part of my involvement with the
7763 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
7764 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
7765 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
7766 Hackathon with our friends
7767 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
7768 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
7769 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
7770 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
7771
7772 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
7773 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
7774
7775       </div>
7776       <div class="tags">
7777
7778
7779         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
7780
7781
7782       </div>
7783     </div>
7784     <div class="padding"></div>
7785
7786     <div class="entry">
7787       <div class="title">
7788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
7789       </div>
7790       <div class="date">
7791          4th April 2015
7792       </div>
7793       <div class="body">
7794         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
7795 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
7796 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
7797 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
7798 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
7799 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
7800 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
7801 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
7802 project pages.  You can also check out the
7803 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
7804 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
7805 and HTML version available in the
7806 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
7807 directory</a>.</p>
7808
7809 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
7810 you find any.</p>
7811
7812       </div>
7813       <div class="tags">
7814
7815
7816         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>.
7817
7818
7819       </div>
7820     </div>
7821     <div class="padding"></div>
7822
7823     <div class="entry">
7824       <div class="title">
7825         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
7826       </div>
7827       <div class="date">
7828          9th March 2015
7829       </div>
7830       <div class="body">
7831         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
7832 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
7833 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
7834 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
7835 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
7836 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
7837 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
7838 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
7839 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
7840 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
7841 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
7842 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
7843 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
7844 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
7845
7846 <p>The list of NUUG videos
7847 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
7848 include things like a
7849 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
7850 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
7851 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
7852 re-implementation</a>, the
7853 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
7854 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
7855 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
7856 video</A> and many others.</p>
7857
7858 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
7859 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
7860 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
7861 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
7862 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
7863 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
7864 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
7865 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
7866 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
7867 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
7868
7869 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
7870 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
7871 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
7872 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
7873 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
7874 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
7875 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
7876 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
7877 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
7878 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
7879
7880       </div>
7881       <div class="tags">
7882
7883
7884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7885
7886
7887       </div>
7888     </div>
7889     <div class="padding"></div>
7890
7891     <div class="entry">
7892       <div class="title">
7893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
7894       </div>
7895       <div class="date">
7896         28th February 2015
7897       </div>
7898       <div class="body">
7899         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
7900 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
7901 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
7902 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
7903 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
7904 made for
7905 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
7906 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
7907 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
7908 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
7909 a friend have
7910 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
7911 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
7912 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
7913 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
7914 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
7915 it happen ourselves.
7916 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
7917 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
7918 is.</p>
7919
7920 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
7921 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
7922
7923       </div>
7924       <div class="tags">
7925
7926
7927         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
7928
7929
7930       </div>
7931     </div>
7932     <div class="padding"></div>
7933
7934     <div class="entry">
7935       <div class="title">
7936         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
7937       </div>
7938       <div class="date">
7939         25th February 2015
7940       </div>
7941       <div class="body">
7942         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
7943 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
7944 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
7945 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
7946 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
7947 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
7948 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
7949 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
7950 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
7951 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
7952 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
7953 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
7954 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
7955 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
7956 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
7957 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
7958 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
7959
7960 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
7961 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
7962 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
7963 with VLC.</p>
7964
7965 <ul>
7966   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
7967   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
7968 </ul>
7969
7970 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
7971 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
7972 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
7973 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
7974 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
7975 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
7976 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
7977
7978 <blockquote><pre>
7979 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
7980  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
7981  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
7982 </pre></blockquote>
7983
7984 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
7985 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
7986 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
7987 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
7988
7989       </div>
7990       <div class="tags">
7991
7992
7993         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7994
7995
7996       </div>
7997     </div>
7998     <div class="padding"></div>
7999
8000     <div class="entry">
8001       <div class="title">
8002         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
8003       </div>
8004       <div class="date">
8005         10th February 2015
8006       </div>
8007       <div class="body">
8008         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
8009 that
8010 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
8011 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
8012 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
8013 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
8014 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
8015 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
8016 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
8017 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
8018 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
8019 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
8020 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
8021 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
8022 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
8023 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
8024 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
8025
8026 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
8027 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
8028 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
8029 controversy about these scanners.</p>
8030
8031 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
8032 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
8033 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
8034
8035       </div>
8036       <div class="tags">
8037
8038
8039         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
8040
8041
8042       </div>
8043     </div>
8044     <div class="padding"></div>
8045
8046     <div class="entry">
8047       <div class="title">
8048         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
8049       </div>
8050       <div class="date">
8051          8th February 2015
8052       </div>
8053       <div class="body">
8054         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
8055 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
8056 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
8057 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
8058 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
8059 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
8060 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
8061 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
8062 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
8063 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
8064 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
8065 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
8066
8067 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
8068 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
8069 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
8070 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
8071
8072 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
8073 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
8074 distribute the TV content.  The
8075 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
8076 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
8077 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
8078 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
8079 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
8080 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
8081 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
8082 following activity, we now have the schedule
8083 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
8084 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
8085 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
8086 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
8087
8088 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
8089 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
8090 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
8091 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
8092 streams are working as they should.</p>
8093
8094       </div>
8095       <div class="tags">
8096
8097
8098         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>.
8099
8100
8101       </div>
8102     </div>
8103     <div class="padding"></div>
8104
8105     <div class="entry">
8106       <div class="title">
8107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
8108       </div>
8109       <div class="date">
8110         12th January 2015
8111       </div>
8112       <div class="body">
8113         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
8114 Foundation</a> announced a new video
8115 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
8116 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
8117 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
8118 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
8119 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
8120 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
8121
8122 <p>But today I was told that
8123 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
8124 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
8125 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
8126 available in
8127 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
8128 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
8129 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
8130
8131 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
8132 Libreplanet
8133 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
8134 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
8135
8136       </div>
8137       <div class="tags">
8138
8139
8140         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
8141
8142
8143       </div>
8144     </div>
8145     <div class="padding"></div>
8146
8147     <div class="entry">
8148       <div class="title">
8149         <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>
8150       </div>
8151       <div class="date">
8152         30th December 2014
8153       </div>
8154       <div class="body">
8155         <p>I am very happy that we in the
8156 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
8157 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
8158 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
8159 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
8160 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
8161 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
8162 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
8163 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
8164 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
8165 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
8166
8167 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
8168 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
8169 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
8170 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
8171 reports in public.</p>
8172
8173       </div>
8174       <div class="tags">
8175
8176
8177         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>.
8178
8179
8180       </div>
8181     </div>
8182     <div class="padding"></div>
8183
8184     <div class="entry">
8185       <div class="title">
8186         <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>
8187       </div>
8188       <div class="date">
8189         19th December 2014
8190       </div>
8191       <div class="body">
8192         <p>So, Sony caved in
8193 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
8194 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
8195 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
8196 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
8197 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
8198 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
8199 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
8200 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
8201 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
8202 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
8203 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
8204 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
8205 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
8206
8207 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
8208 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
8209 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
8210 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
8211
8212 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
8213 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
8214 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
8215 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
8216 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
8217 income. :)</p>
8218
8219       </div>
8220       <div class="tags">
8221
8222
8223         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>.
8224
8225
8226       </div>
8227     </div>
8228     <div class="padding"></div>
8229
8230     <div class="entry">
8231       <div class="title">
8232         <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>
8233       </div>
8234       <div class="date">
8235         22nd November 2014
8236       </div>
8237       <div class="body">
8238         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
8239 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
8240 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
8241 courtesy of
8242 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
8243 Schubert</a> and
8244 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
8245 McVittie</a>.
8246
8247 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
8248 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
8249 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
8250 you upgrade:</p>
8251
8252 <p><blockquote><pre>
8253 Package: systemd-sysv
8254 Pin: release o=Debian
8255 Pin-Priority: -1
8256 </pre></blockquote><p>
8257
8258 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
8259 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
8260 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
8261 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
8262 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
8263
8264 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
8265 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
8266 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
8267 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
8268 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
8269 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
8270
8271 <p><blockquote><pre>
8272 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
8273 </pre></blockquote><p>
8274
8275 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
8276
8277 <p><blockquote><pre>
8278 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
8279 </pre></blockquote><p>
8280
8281 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
8282 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
8283
8284 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
8285 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
8286 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
8287 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
8288 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
8289 Jessie is released.</p>
8290
8291 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
8292 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
8293 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
8294 line.</p>
8295
8296       </div>
8297       <div class="tags">
8298
8299
8300         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>.
8301
8302
8303       </div>
8304     </div>
8305     <div class="padding"></div>
8306
8307     <div class="entry">
8308       <div class="title">
8309         <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>
8310       </div>
8311       <div class="date">
8312         10th November 2014
8313       </div>
8314       <div class="body">
8315         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
8316 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
8317 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
8318
8319 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
8320 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
8321 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
8322 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
8323 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
8324 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
8325 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
8326 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
8327 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
8328 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
8329 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
8330 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
8331 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
8332 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
8333 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
8334
8335 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
8336 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
8337 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
8338 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
8339 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
8340 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
8341 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
8342 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
8343 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
8344 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
8345 were fairly easy, and
8346 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
8347 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
8348 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
8349 useful approach.</p>
8350
8351 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
8352 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
8353 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
8354 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
8355 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
8356 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
8357 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
8358 this:</p>
8359
8360 <p><blockquote><pre>
8361 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
8362   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
8363 </pre></blockquote></p>
8364
8365 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
8366 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
8367
8368 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
8369 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
8370 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
8371 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
8372 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
8373 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
8374 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
8375 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
8376 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
8377 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
8378 system.</p>
8379
8380 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
8381 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
8382 SMTorP. :)</p>
8383
8384       </div>
8385       <div class="tags">
8386
8387
8388         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8389
8390
8391       </div>
8392     </div>
8393     <div class="padding"></div>
8394
8395     <div class="entry">
8396       <div class="title">
8397         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
8398       </div>
8399       <div class="date">
8400         27th October 2014
8401       </div>
8402       <div class="body">
8403         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
8404 sent out
8405 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
8406 announcement</a>:</p>
8407
8408 <pre>
8409 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
8410 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
8411
8412 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
8413 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
8414 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
8415 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
8416 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
8417 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
8418 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
8419
8420 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
8421 installation instructions are available, including detailed
8422 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
8423 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
8424 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
8425 of at least 5 characters!
8426
8427  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
8428
8429 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
8430 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
8431 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
8432 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
8433 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
8434
8435 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
8436 mostly in Germany and Norway.
8437
8438 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
8439 ===============================
8440
8441 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
8442 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
8443 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
8444 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
8445 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
8446 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
8447 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
8448 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
8449 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
8450 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
8451 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
8452 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
8453 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
8454 environment.
8455
8456  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
8457  [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;
8458
8459 Full release notes and manual
8460 =============================
8461
8462 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
8463 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
8464 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
8465 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
8466 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
8467
8468  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
8469  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
8470
8471 Where to get it
8472 ---------------
8473
8474 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
8475
8476  * <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>
8477  * <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>
8478  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
8479
8480 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
8481
8482 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
8483 ===============================================================================
8484
8485
8486 Installation changes
8487 --------------------
8488
8489  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
8490
8491 Software updates
8492 ----------------
8493
8494 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
8495
8496  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
8497  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
8498    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
8499    choose one of the others see manual.)
8500  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
8501  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
8502  * GOsa 2.7.4
8503  * LTSP 5.5.4
8504  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
8505  * new boot framework: systemd
8506  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
8507  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
8508  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
8509  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
8510  * golearn 0.9
8511  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
8512  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
8513  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
8514    installation.
8515  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
8516    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
8517
8518  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
8519  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
8520
8521 Fixed bugs
8522 ----------
8523
8524  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
8525    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
8526    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
8527  * and many others.
8528
8529 Documentation and translation updates
8530 -------------------------------------
8531
8532  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
8533    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
8534    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
8535
8536 Other changes
8537 -------------
8538
8539  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
8540    server takes more time.
8541  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
8542    doesn't work.
8543
8544 Regressions / known problems
8545 ----------------------------
8546
8547  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
8548    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
8549    and Debian bug #762103).
8550  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
8551    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
8552  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
8553    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
8554    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
8555
8556 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
8557
8558  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
8559
8560 How to report bugs
8561 ------------------
8562
8563 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
8564
8565 About Debian
8566 ============
8567
8568 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
8569 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
8570 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
8571 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
8572 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
8573 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
8574 operating system.
8575
8576 Contact Information
8577 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
8578 mail to press@debian.org.
8579
8580  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
8581 </pre>
8582
8583       </div>
8584       <div class="tags">
8585
8586
8587         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8588
8589
8590       </div>
8591     </div>
8592     <div class="padding"></div>
8593
8594     <div class="entry">
8595       <div class="title">
8596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
8597       </div>
8598       <div class="date">
8599         23rd October 2014
8600       </div>
8601       <div class="body">
8602         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
8603 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
8604 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
8605 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
8606 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
8607 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
8608 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
8609 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
8610 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
8611 live.</p>
8612
8613 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
8614 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
8615 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
8616 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
8617 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
8618 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
8619 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
8620 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
8621
8622       </div>
8623       <div class="tags">
8624
8625
8626         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>.
8627
8628
8629       </div>
8630     </div>
8631     <div class="padding"></div>
8632
8633     <div class="entry">
8634       <div class="title">
8635         <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>
8636       </div>
8637       <div class="date">
8638         22nd October 2014
8639       </div>
8640       <div class="body">
8641         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
8642 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
8643 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
8644 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
8645 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
8646 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
8647 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
8648 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
8649 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
8650 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
8651 lists I recently took over:</p>
8652
8653 <p><blockquote><pre>
8654 % time listadmin xiph
8655 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8656 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8657
8658 real    0m1.709s
8659 user    0m0.232s
8660 sys     0m0.012s
8661 %
8662 </pre></blockquote></p>
8663
8664 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
8665 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
8666 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
8667 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
8668 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
8669 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
8670 program.</p>
8671
8672 <p>If you install
8673 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
8674 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
8675 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
8676
8677 <p><blockquote><pre>
8678 username username@example.org
8679 spamlevel 23
8680 default discard
8681 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
8682
8683 password secret
8684 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
8685 mailman-list@lists.example.com
8686
8687 password hidden
8688 other-list@otherserver.example.org
8689 </pre></blockquote></p>
8690
8691 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
8692 learn the details.</p>
8693
8694 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
8695 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
8696 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
8697 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
8698
8699 <p><blockquote><pre>
8700 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
8701 </pre></blockquote></p>
8702
8703 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
8704 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
8705 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
8706 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
8707 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
8708 email.</p>
8709
8710 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
8711 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
8712 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
8713 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
8714 software.</p>
8715
8716 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8717 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8718 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8719
8720 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
8721 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
8722 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
8723 sure why.</p>
8724
8725       </div>
8726       <div class="tags">
8727
8728
8729         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
8730
8731
8732       </div>
8733     </div>
8734     <div class="padding"></div>
8735
8736     <div class="entry">
8737       <div class="title">
8738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
8739       </div>
8740       <div class="date">
8741         17th October 2014
8742       </div>
8743       <div class="body">
8744         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
8745 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
8746 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
8747 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
8748 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
8749 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
8750 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
8751
8752 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
8753 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
8754 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
8755 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
8756 of this story.)</p>
8757
8758 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
8759 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
8760 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
8761 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
8762 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
8763 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
8764 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
8765 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
8766 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
8767 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
8768
8769 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
8770 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
8771 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
8772 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
8773
8774 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
8775 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
8776
8777 <p><blockquote><pre>
8778 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
8779 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
8780 </pre></blockquote></p>
8781
8782 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
8783 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
8784 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
8785 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
8786 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
8787 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
8788 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
8789 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
8790
8791 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
8792 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
8793
8794 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
8795 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
8796 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
8797 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
8798 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
8799
8800 <p><blockquote><pre>
8801 Task: isenkram-packages
8802 Section: hardware
8803 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8804  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8805  proposed.
8806 Test-new-install: show show
8807 Relevance: 8
8808 Packages: for-current-hardware
8809
8810 Task: isenkram-firmware
8811 Section: hardware
8812 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8813  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
8814  packages are proposed.
8815 Test-new-install: mark show
8816 Relevance: 8
8817 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
8818 </pre></blockquote></p>
8819
8820 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
8821 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
8822 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
8823 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
8824 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
8825
8826 <p><blockquote><pre>
8827 #!/bin/sh
8828 #
8829 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
8830 export PATH
8831 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8832 </pre></blockquote></p>
8833
8834 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
8835 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
8836
8837 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
8838 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
8839 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
8840 install.</p>
8841
8842 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
8843 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
8844 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
8845
8846       </div>
8847       <div class="tags">
8848
8849
8850         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8851
8852
8853       </div>
8854     </div>
8855     <div class="padding"></div>
8856
8857     <div class="entry">
8858       <div class="title">
8859         <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>
8860       </div>
8861       <div class="date">
8862          4th October 2014
8863       </div>
8864       <div class="body">
8865         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
8866 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
8867 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
8868 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
8869
8870 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
8871
8872 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
8873 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
8874 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
8875
8876       </div>
8877       <div class="tags">
8878
8879
8880         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8881
8882
8883       </div>
8884     </div>
8885     <div class="padding"></div>
8886
8887     <div class="entry">
8888       <div class="title">
8889         <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>
8890       </div>
8891       <div class="date">
8892          4th October 2014
8893       </div>
8894       <div class="body">
8895         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
8896 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
8897 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
8898 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
8899 Dibb.</p>
8900
8901 <p>I just wrapped up
8902 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
8903 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
8904 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
8905 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
8906 0.17.</p>
8907
8908 <ul>
8909
8910  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
8911  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
8912    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
8913  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
8914  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
8915  <li>Fix include orders</li>
8916  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
8917  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
8918  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
8919    the palette size is the same.</li>
8920  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
8921  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
8922  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
8923  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
8924    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
8925
8926 </ul>
8927
8928 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
8929 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
8930 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
8931
8932       </div>
8933       <div class="tags">
8934
8935
8936         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
8937
8938
8939       </div>
8940     </div>
8941     <div class="padding"></div>
8942
8943     <div class="entry">
8944       <div class="title">
8945         <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>
8946       </div>
8947       <div class="date">
8948         26th September 2014
8949       </div>
8950       <div class="body">
8951         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8952 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
8953 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
8954 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
8955 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
8956 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
8957 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
8958 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
8959 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
8960 future.  The
8961 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
8962 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
8963 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
8964 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
8965 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
8966
8967 <p>First, download the test ISO via
8968 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
8969 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
8970 or rsync (use
8971 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
8972 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
8973 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
8974 install with some tweaking.</p>
8975
8976 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
8977 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
8978
8979 <p><blockquote><pre>
8980 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
8981 </pre></blockquote></p>
8982
8983 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
8984 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
8985 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
8986 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
8987
8988 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
8989 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
8990 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
8991 your need.</p>
8992
8993 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
8994 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
8995 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
8996 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
8997 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
8998 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
8999 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
9000 days.</p>
9001
9002 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
9003 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
9004 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
9005 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
9006 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
9007 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
9008 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
9009 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
9010 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
9011
9012 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
9013 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
9014 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
9015
9016       </div>
9017       <div class="tags">
9018
9019
9020         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>.
9021
9022
9023       </div>
9024     </div>
9025     <div class="padding"></div>
9026
9027     <div class="entry">
9028       <div class="title">
9029         <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>
9030       </div>
9031       <div class="date">
9032         25th September 2014
9033       </div>
9034       <div class="body">
9035         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
9036 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
9037 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
9038 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
9039 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
9040 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
9041 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
9042 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
9043 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
9044 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
9045 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
9046 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
9047 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
9048
9049 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
9050 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
9051 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
9052 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
9053 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
9054 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
9055 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
9056 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
9057 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
9058 list</a>. :)</p>
9059
9060       </div>
9061       <div class="tags">
9062
9063
9064         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
9065
9066
9067       </div>
9068     </div>
9069     <div class="padding"></div>
9070
9071     <div class="entry">
9072       <div class="title">
9073         <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>
9074       </div>
9075       <div class="date">
9076         16th September 2014
9077       </div>
9078       <div class="body">
9079         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
9080 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
9081 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
9082 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
9083 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
9084 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
9085 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
9086 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
9087 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
9088 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
9089 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
9090 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
9091 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
9092 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
9093
9094 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
9095 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
9096 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
9097 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
9098 depend on the small and clever package
9099 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
9100 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
9101 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
9102 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
9103 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
9104 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
9105 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
9106 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
9107 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
9108 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
9109 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
9110
9111 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
9112 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
9113 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
9114 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
9115 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
9116 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
9117 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
9118 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
9119 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
9120 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
9121 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
9122 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
9123 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
9124 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
9125 dialog.</p>
9126
9127 <p><table>
9128
9129 <tr>
9130 <th>Machine/setup</th>
9131 <th>Original tasksel</th>
9132 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
9133 <th>Reduction</th>
9134 </tr>
9135
9136 <tr>
9137 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
9138 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
9139 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
9140 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
9141 </tr>
9142
9143 <tr>
9144 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
9145 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
9146 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
9147 <td>23 min 40%</td>
9148 </tr>
9149
9150 <tr>
9151 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
9152 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
9153 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
9154 <td>11 min 50%</td>
9155 </tr>
9156
9157 <tr>
9158 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
9159 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
9160 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
9161 <td>2 min 33%</td>
9162 </tr>
9163
9164 <tr>
9165 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
9166 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
9167 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
9168 <td>4 min 21%</td>
9169 </tr>
9170
9171 </table></p>
9172
9173 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
9174 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
9175 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
9176 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
9177 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
9178 installed.</p>
9179
9180 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
9181 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
9182 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
9183 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
9184 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
9185 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
9186 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
9187 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
9188 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
9189 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
9190 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
9191 for the entire installation.</p>
9192
9193 <p>I've implemented this in the
9194 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
9195 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
9196 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
9197 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
9198 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
9199
9200 <p><blockquote><pre>
9201 #!/bin/sh
9202 set -e
9203 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9204 info() {
9205     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
9206 }
9207 error() {
9208     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
9209 }
9210 override_install() {
9211     apt-install eatmydata || true
9212     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
9213         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9214             file=/usr/bin/$bin
9215             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
9216             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
9217                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
9218                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
9219                     > /target$file.edu
9220                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
9221                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9222                     --rename --quiet --add $file
9223                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
9224             else
9225                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
9226             fi
9227         done
9228     else
9229         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
9230     fi
9231 }
9232
9233 override_install
9234 </pre></blockquote></p>
9235
9236 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
9237 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
9238
9239 <p><blockquote><pre>
9240 #! /bin/sh -e
9241 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9242 error() {
9243     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
9244 }
9245 remove_install_override() {
9246     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9247         file=/usr/bin/$bin
9248         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
9249             rm /target$file
9250             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9251                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
9252             rm /target$file.edu
9253         else
9254             error "Missing divert for $file."
9255         fi
9256     done
9257     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
9258 }
9259
9260 remove_install_override
9261 </pre></blockquote></p>
9262
9263 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
9264 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
9265 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
9266
9267 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
9268 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
9269 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
9270 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
9271 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
9272 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
9273 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
9274 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
9275 everyone.</p>
9276
9277 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
9278 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
9279 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
9280 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
9281
9282 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
9283 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
9284 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
9285 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
9286 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
9287
9288 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
9289 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
9290 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
9291 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
9292 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
9293
9294       </div>
9295       <div class="tags">
9296
9297
9298         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>.
9299
9300
9301       </div>
9302     </div>
9303     <div class="padding"></div>
9304
9305     <div class="entry">
9306       <div class="title">
9307         <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>
9308       </div>
9309       <div class="date">
9310         10th September 2014
9311       </div>
9312       <div class="body">
9313         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
9314 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
9315 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
9316 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
9317 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
9318 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
9319 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
9320 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
9321 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
9322 those problems are gone now.</p>
9323
9324 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
9325 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
9326 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
9327 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
9328 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
9329
9330 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
9331 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
9332 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
9333
9334 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
9335 line:</p>
9336
9337 <p><blockquote><pre>
9338 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
9339 </pre></blockquote></p>
9340
9341 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
9342 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
9343 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
9344 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
9345
9346 <p><blockquote><pre>
9347 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
9348 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
9349 %
9350 </pre></blockquote></p>
9351
9352 <p>Now if only
9353 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
9354 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
9355 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
9356 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
9357 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
9358 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
9359 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
9360 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
9361 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
9362
9363       </div>
9364       <div class="tags">
9365
9366
9367         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
9368
9369
9370       </div>
9371     </div>
9372     <div class="padding"></div>
9373
9374     <div class="entry">
9375       <div class="title">
9376         <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>
9377       </div>
9378       <div class="date">
9379         25th August 2014
9380       </div>
9381       <div class="body">
9382         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
9383 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
9384 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
9385 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
9386 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
9387 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
9388 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
9389 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
9390 am not sure.
9391 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
9392 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
9393 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
9394 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
9395 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
9396 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
9397 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
9398 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
9399 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
9400 licenses are.</p>
9401
9402 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
9403 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
9404 end user</a>
9405 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
9406 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
9407
9408 <p><blockquote>
9409 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
9410 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
9411
9412 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
9413 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
9414 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
9415 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
9416 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
9417 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
9418 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
9419 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
9420 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
9421 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
9422 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
9423 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
9424 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
9425 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
9426 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
9427 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
9428 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
9429 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
9430
9431 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
9432 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
9433
9434 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
9435 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
9436 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
9437 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
9438 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
9439 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
9440 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
9441 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9442 </blockquote></p>
9443
9444 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
9445 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
9446
9447 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
9448 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
9449
9450 <p><blockquote>
9451
9452 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
9453 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
9454 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
9455 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
9456 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
9457 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
9458 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
9459 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
9460 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
9461 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
9462 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
9463 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9464
9465 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
9466 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
9467 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
9468 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
9469 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
9470 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
9471 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
9472 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
9473 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
9474 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
9475 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
9476 additional details.</p>
9477
9478 </blockquote></p>
9479
9480 <p>Some free software like
9481 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
9482 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
9483 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
9484 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
9485
9486       </div>
9487       <div class="tags">
9488
9489
9490         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9491
9492
9493       </div>
9494     </div>
9495     <div class="padding"></div>
9496
9497     <div class="entry">
9498       <div class="title">
9499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
9500       </div>
9501       <div class="date">
9502         31st July 2014
9503       </div>
9504       <div class="body">
9505         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
9506 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9507 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
9508 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
9509 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
9510 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
9511
9512 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9513
9514 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
9515 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
9516 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
9517 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
9518 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
9519 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
9520 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
9521 works with Windows . :-(</p>
9522
9523 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
9524 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
9525 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
9526 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
9527 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
9528 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
9529
9530 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9531 project?</strong></p>
9532
9533 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
9534 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
9535 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
9536 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
9537 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
9538 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
9539 with this job.</p>
9540
9541 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9542 Edu?</strong></p>
9543
9544 <p>The independence.</p>
9545
9546 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
9547 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
9548 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
9549
9550 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
9551 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
9552 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
9553 working reliable. </p>
9554
9555 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
9556 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
9557 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
9558 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
9559 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
9560 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
9561 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
9562 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
9563
9564 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9565 Edu?</strong></p>
9566
9567 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
9568 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
9569 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
9570
9571 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9572
9573 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
9574 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
9575
9576 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9577 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9578
9579 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
9580 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
9581 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
9582 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
9583 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
9584 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
9585 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
9586
9587       </div>
9588       <div class="tags">
9589
9590
9591         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
9592
9593
9594       </div>
9595     </div>
9596     <div class="padding"></div>
9597
9598     <div class="entry">
9599       <div class="title">
9600         <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>
9601       </div>
9602       <div class="date">
9603         23rd July 2014
9604       </div>
9605       <div class="body">
9606         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
9607 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
9608 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
9609 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
9610 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
9611 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
9612 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
9613 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
9614 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
9615 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
9616 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
9617 the translation show this very well:</p>
9618
9619 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
9620
9621 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
9622 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
9623 project pages and the
9624 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
9625 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
9626 and HTML version available in the
9627 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
9628 directory</a>.</p>
9629
9630 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
9631 you find any.</p>
9632
9633       </div>
9634       <div class="tags">
9635
9636
9637         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>.
9638
9639
9640       </div>
9641     </div>
9642     <div class="padding"></div>
9643
9644     <div class="entry">
9645       <div class="title">
9646         <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>
9647       </div>
9648       <div class="date">
9649         17th June 2014
9650       </div>
9651       <div class="body">
9652         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9653 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
9654 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
9655 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
9656 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
9657
9658 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
9659 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
9660 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
9661 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
9662 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
9663 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
9664 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
9665 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
9666 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
9667 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
9668 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
9669 goals.</p>
9670
9671 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
9672 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
9673 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
9674 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
9675 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
9676 chapters together into one large web page (aka
9677 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
9678 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
9679 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
9680 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
9681 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
9682 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
9683 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
9684 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
9685 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
9686 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
9687 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
9688 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
9689 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
9690 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
9691 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
9692 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
9693 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
9694 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
9695
9696 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
9697 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
9698 track the English original.  For this we use the
9699 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
9700 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
9701 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
9702 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
9703 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
9704 files), which the translations update with the native language
9705 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
9706 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
9707 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
9708 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
9709 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
9710 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
9711 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
9712 of the documentation.</p>
9713
9714 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
9715 recommend using
9716 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
9717 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
9718 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
9719 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
9720 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
9721 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
9722 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
9723 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
9724
9725 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
9726 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
9727 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
9728 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
9729 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
9730 translated images by storing translated versions in
9731 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
9732 package maintainers know more.</p>
9733
9734 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
9735 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
9736 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
9737 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
9738 PDF version</a> or the
9739 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
9740 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
9741 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
9742
9743 <p>To learn more, check out
9744 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
9745 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
9746 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
9747 manual on the wiki</a> and
9748 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
9749 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
9750
9751       </div>
9752       <div class="tags">
9753
9754
9755         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>.
9756
9757
9758       </div>
9759     </div>
9760     <div class="padding"></div>
9761
9762     <div class="entry">
9763       <div class="title">
9764         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
9765       </div>
9766       <div class="date">
9767         29th May 2014
9768       </div>
9769       <div class="body">
9770         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
9771 in my car, connected to
9772 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
9773 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
9774 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
9775 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
9776 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
9777 such car computer.</p>
9778
9779 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
9780
9781 <ul>
9782
9783  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
9784
9785  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
9786    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
9787    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
9788    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
9789    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
9790
9791  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
9792    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
9793    route.</li>
9794
9795  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
9796
9797  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
9798    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
9799    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
9800    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
9801    connection do not work.</li>
9802
9803  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
9804    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
9805
9806  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
9807    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
9808
9809  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
9810    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
9811
9812 </ul>
9813
9814 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
9815 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
9816
9817       </div>
9818       <div class="tags">
9819
9820
9821         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9822
9823
9824       </div>
9825     </div>
9826     <div class="padding"></div>
9827
9828     <div class="entry">
9829       <div class="title">
9830         <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>
9831       </div>
9832       <div class="date">
9833         29th April 2014
9834       </div>
9835       <div class="body">
9836         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
9837 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
9838 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
9839 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
9840 newer AVM2 format - see
9841 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
9842 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
9843 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
9844 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
9845 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
9846 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
9847 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
9848 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
9849 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
9850 sites do not work yet.</p>
9851
9852 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
9853 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
9854 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
9855 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
9856 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
9857 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
9858 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
9859 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
9860 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
9861 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
9862 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
9863
9864 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
9865 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
9866 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
9867 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
9868 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
9869 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
9870 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
9871
9872 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
9873 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
9874 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
9875 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
9876 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
9877
9878       </div>
9879       <div class="tags">
9880
9881
9882         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>.
9883
9884
9885       </div>
9886     </div>
9887     <div class="padding"></div>
9888
9889     <div class="entry">
9890       <div class="title">
9891         <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>
9892       </div>
9893       <div class="date">
9894         23rd April 2014
9895       </div>
9896       <div class="body">
9897         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
9898 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
9899 So I implemented one, using
9900 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
9901 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
9902 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
9903 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
9904 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
9905 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
9906
9907 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
9908 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
9909 packages to install.  The first part is in
9910 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
9911 this:</p>
9912
9913 <p><blockquote><pre>
9914 Task: isenkram
9915 Section: hardware
9916 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
9917  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
9918  proposed.
9919 Test-new-install: mark show
9920 Relevance: 8
9921 Packages: for-current-hardware
9922 </pre></blockquote></p>
9923
9924 <p>The second part is in
9925 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
9926 this:</p>
9927
9928 <p><blockquote><pre>
9929 #!/bin/sh
9930 #
9931 (
9932     isenkram-lookup
9933     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
9934 ) | sort -u
9935 </pre></blockquote></p>
9936
9937 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
9938 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
9939 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
9940 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
9941 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
9942 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
9943
9944 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
9945 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
9946 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
9947 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
9948 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
9949 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
9950 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
9951 the python-apt code (bug
9952 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
9953 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
9954 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
9955 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
9956 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
9957 unstable today.</p>
9958
9959 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
9960 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
9961 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
9962 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
9963 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
9964 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
9965 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
9966 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
9967 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
9968
9969 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
9970 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
9971 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
9972 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
9973 package.  See also
9974 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
9975 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
9976 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
9977 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
9978
9979       </div>
9980       <div class="tags">
9981
9982
9983         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
9984
9985
9986       </div>
9987     </div>
9988     <div class="padding"></div>
9989
9990     <div class="entry">
9991       <div class="title">
9992         <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>
9993       </div>
9994       <div class="date">
9995         15th April 2014
9996       </div>
9997       <div class="body">
9998         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9999 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
10000 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
10001 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
10002 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
10003 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
10004
10005 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
10006 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
10007 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
10008 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
10009 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
10010 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
10011 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
10012
10013 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
10014 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
10015 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
10016 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
10017 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
10018 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
10019 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
10020 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
10021 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
10022 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
10023 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
10024 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
10025
10026 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
10027 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
10028 become root:</p>
10029
10030 <p><pre>
10031 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
10032   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
10033   u-boot-tools
10034 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
10035   freedom-maker
10036 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
10037 </pre></p>
10038
10039 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
10040 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
10041 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
10042 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
10043 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
10044 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
10045 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
10046 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
10047
10048 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
10049 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
10050 the preseed values:</p>
10051
10052 <p><pre>
10053 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
10054 </pre></p>
10055
10056 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
10057 it still work.</p>
10058
10059 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
10060 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
10061 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
10062 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
10063 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
10064 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
10065 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
10066
10067 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
10068 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
10069 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
10070 irc.debian.org)</a> and
10071 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
10072 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
10073
10074       </div>
10075       <div class="tags">
10076
10077
10078         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
10079
10080
10081       </div>
10082     </div>
10083     <div class="padding"></div>
10084
10085     <div class="entry">
10086       <div class="title">
10087         <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>
10088       </div>
10089       <div class="date">
10090          9th April 2014
10091       </div>
10092       <div class="body">
10093         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
10094 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
10095 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
10096 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
10097 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
10098 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
10099 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
10100 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
10101 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
10102 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
10103 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
10104 have looked at a system called
10105 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
10106 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
10107
10108 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
10109 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
10110 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
10111 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
10112 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
10113 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
10114 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
10115 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
10116 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
10117 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
10118 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
10119 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
10120 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
10121
10122 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
10123 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
10124 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
10125 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
10126 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
10127 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
10128 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
10129 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
10130 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
10131 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
10132 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
10133 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
10134 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
10135 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
10136 account.</p>
10137
10138 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
10139 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
10140 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
10141 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
10142 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
10143 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
10144 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
10145
10146 <p><blockquote><pre>
10147 [s3c]
10148 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10149 backend-login: API-login
10150 backend-password: API-password
10151 fs-passphrase: local-password
10152 </pre></blockquote></p>
10153
10154 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
10155 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
10156 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
10157 details and password to create it:</p>
10158
10159 <p><blockquote><pre>
10160 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
10161 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10162   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10163 Enter backend login:
10164 Enter backend password:
10165 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
10166 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
10167 Enter encryption password:
10168 Confirm encryption password:
10169 Generating random encryption key...
10170 Creating metadata tables...
10171 Dumping metadata...
10172 ..objects..
10173 ..blocks..
10174 ..inodes..
10175 ..inode_blocks..
10176 ..symlink_targets..
10177 ..names..
10178 ..contents..
10179 ..ext_attributes..
10180 Compressing and uploading metadata...
10181 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
10182 # </pre></blockquote></p>
10183
10184 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
10185
10186 <p><blockquote><pre>
10187 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10188   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
10189 Using 4 upload threads.
10190 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
10191 Reading metadata...
10192 ..objects..
10193 ..blocks..
10194 ..inodes..
10195 ..inode_blocks..
10196 ..symlink_targets..
10197 ..names..
10198 ..contents..
10199 ..ext_attributes..
10200 Mounting filesystem...
10201 # df -h /s3ql
10202 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
10203 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
10204 #
10205 </pre></blockquote></p>
10206
10207 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
10208 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
10209 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
10210 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
10211 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
10212 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
10213
10214 <p><blockquote><pre>
10215 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
10216 #
10217 </pre></blockquote></p>
10218
10219 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
10220 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
10221 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
10222 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
10223 file system:</p>
10224
10225 <p><blockquote><pre>
10226 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10227 Using cached metadata.
10228 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
10229 Checking DB integrity...
10230 Creating temporary extra indices...
10231 Checking lost+found...
10232 Checking cached objects...
10233 Checking names (refcounts)...
10234 Checking contents (names)...
10235 Checking contents (inodes)...
10236 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
10237 Checking objects (reference counts)...
10238 Checking objects (backend)...
10239 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
10240 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
10241 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
10242 Checking objects (sizes)...
10243 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
10244 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
10245 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
10246 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
10247 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
10248 Checking inodes (sizes)...
10249 Checking extended attributes (names)...
10250 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
10251 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
10252 Checking directory reachability...
10253 Checking unix conventions...
10254 Checking referential integrity...
10255 Dropping temporary indices...
10256 Backing up old metadata...
10257 Dumping metadata...
10258 ..objects..
10259 ..blocks..
10260 ..inodes..
10261 ..inode_blocks..
10262 ..symlink_targets..
10263 ..names..
10264 ..contents..
10265 ..ext_attributes..
10266 Compressing and uploading metadata...
10267 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
10268 #
10269 </pre></blockquote></p>
10270
10271 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
10272 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
10273 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
10274 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
10275 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
10276 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
10277 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
10278 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
10279 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
10280 working set.</p>
10281
10282 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
10283 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
10284 busy:</p>
10285
10286 <p><blockquote><pre>
10287 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10288   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
10289 Using 8 upload threads.
10290 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
10291 #
10292 </pre></blockquote></p>
10293
10294 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
10295 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
10296 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
10297 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
10298 s3qlctrl:
10299
10300 <p><blockquote><pre>
10301 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
10302 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
10303 #
10304 </pre></blockquote></p>
10305
10306 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
10307 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
10308 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
10309 a report:</p>
10310
10311 <p><blockquote><pre>
10312 # s3qlstat /s3ql
10313 Directory entries:    9141
10314 Inodes:               9143
10315 Data blocks:          8851
10316 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
10317 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
10318 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
10319 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
10320 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
10321 #
10322 </pre></blockquote></p>
10323
10324 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
10325 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
10326 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
10327 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
10328 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
10329 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
10330 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
10331 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
10332 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
10333 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
10334 best.</p>
10335
10336 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
10337 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
10338 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
10339 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
10340 poster is titled
10341 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
10342 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
10343 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
10344 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
10345 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
10346
10347 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
10348 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
10349 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
10350 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
10351 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
10352 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
10353 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
10354 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
10355
10356 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
10357 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
10358 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
10359 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
10360 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
10361 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
10362 only read from it.</p>
10363
10364 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10365 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10366 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10367
10368       </div>
10369       <div class="tags">
10370
10371
10372         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10373
10374
10375       </div>
10376     </div>
10377     <div class="padding"></div>
10378
10379     <div class="entry">
10380       <div class="title">
10381         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
10382       </div>
10383       <div class="date">
10384          1st April 2014
10385       </div>
10386       <div class="body">
10387         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
10388 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
10389 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
10390 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
10391 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
10392 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
10393 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
10394 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
10395 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
10396 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
10397 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
10398 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
10399 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
10400
10401 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
10402 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
10403 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
10404 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
10405 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
10406 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
10407 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
10408 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
10409 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
10410 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
10411 Linux.</p>
10412
10413 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
10414 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
10415 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
10416 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
10417 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
10418 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
10419 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
10420 Windows before metro).</p>
10421
10422 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
10423 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
10424 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
10425 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
10426 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
10427 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
10428 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
10429 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
10430 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
10431 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
10432 old Windows binaries, check it out by
10433 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
10434 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
10435 image.</p>
10436
10437       </div>
10438       <div class="tags">
10439
10440
10441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
10442
10443
10444       </div>
10445     </div>
10446     <div class="padding"></div>
10447
10448     <div class="entry">
10449       <div class="title">
10450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
10451       </div>
10452       <div class="date">
10453         30th March 2014
10454       </div>
10455       <div class="body">
10456         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
10457 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
10458 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
10459 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
10460 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
10461
10462 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10463
10464 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
10465 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
10466 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
10467 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
10468 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
10469
10470 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
10471 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
10472 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
10473
10474 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
10475 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
10476 hunger.</p>
10477
10478 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10479 project?</strong></p>
10480
10481 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
10482 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
10483 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
10484 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
10485 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
10486 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
10487 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
10488 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
10489 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
10490 running.  I just loved it.</p>
10491
10492 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10493 Edu?</strong></p>
10494
10495 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
10496 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
10497 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
10498 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
10499 be made of steel.</p>
10500
10501 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10502 Edu?</strong></p>
10503
10504 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
10505
10506 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
10507 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
10508 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
10509 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
10510 or dropped.</p>
10511
10512 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
10513 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
10514 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
10515 discourage many people too.</p>
10516
10517 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10518
10519 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
10520 Virtualbox.</p>
10521
10522
10523 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10524 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10525
10526 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
10527 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
10528 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
10529 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
10530 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
10531 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
10532 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
10533 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
10534 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
10535
10536       </div>
10537       <div class="tags">
10538
10539
10540         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10541
10542
10543       </div>
10544     </div>
10545     <div class="padding"></div>
10546
10547     <div class="entry">
10548       <div class="title">
10549         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
10550       </div>
10551       <div class="date">
10552         25th March 2014
10553       </div>
10554       <div class="body">
10555         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
10556 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
10557 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
10558 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
10559 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
10560 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
10561 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
10562 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
10563 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
10564
10565 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
10566 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
10567 looked a given way.  Such
10568 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
10569 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
10570 called a
10571 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
10572 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
10573 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
10574 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
10575 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
10576 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
10577 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
10578 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
10579 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
10580 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
10581 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
10582 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
10583 There are several commercial services around providing such
10584 timestamping.  A quick search for
10585 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
10586 service</a>" pointed me to at least
10587 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
10588 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
10589 Vadis</a>,
10590 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
10591 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
10592 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
10593 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
10594
10595 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
10596 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
10597 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
10598 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
10599 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
10600 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
10601 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
10602 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
10603 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
10604 Greifswald.</p>
10605
10606 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
10607 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
10608 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
10609 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
10610 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
10611
10612 <p><blockquote><pre>
10613 #!/bin/sh
10614 set -e
10615 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
10616 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
10617 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
10618 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
10619 cafile=chain.txt
10620 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
10621     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
10622 fi
10623 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
10624     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
10625 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
10626 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
10627 base64 < "$resfile"
10628 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
10629 </pre></blockquote></p>
10630
10631 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
10632 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
10633 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
10634 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
10635 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
10636 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
10637 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
10638 changed.</p>
10639
10640 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
10641 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
10642 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
10643 to set up?</p>
10644
10645       </div>
10646       <div class="tags">
10647
10648
10649         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>.
10650
10651
10652       </div>
10653     </div>
10654     <div class="padding"></div>
10655
10656     <div class="entry">
10657       <div class="title">
10658         <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>
10659       </div>
10660       <div class="date">
10661         21st March 2014
10662       </div>
10663       <div class="body">
10664         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
10665 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
10666 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
10667 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
10668 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
10669 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
10670 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
10671
10672 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
10673 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
10674 tried using
10675 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
10676 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
10677 and program
10678 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
10679 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
10680 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
10681 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
10682 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
10683 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
10684 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
10685 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
10686 this method.</p>
10687
10688 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
10689 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
10690 problem is
10691 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
10692 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
10693 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
10694 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
10695 DVD structures, as the python library
10696 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
10697 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
10698 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
10699 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
10700 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
10701 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
10702
10703 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
10704 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
10705
10706       </div>
10707       <div class="tags">
10708
10709
10710         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10711
10712
10713       </div>
10714     </div>
10715     <div class="padding"></div>
10716
10717     <div class="entry">
10718       <div class="title">
10719         <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>
10720       </div>
10721       <div class="date">
10722         14th March 2014
10723       </div>
10724       <div class="body">
10725         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
10726 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
10727 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
10728 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
10729 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
10730 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
10731 release (0.2).</p>
10732
10733 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
10734 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
10735 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
10736 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
10737 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
10738 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
10739 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
10740 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
10741 and build using
10742 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
10743 with a user with sudo access to become root:
10744
10745 <pre>
10746 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
10747   freedom-maker
10748 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
10749   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
10750   u-boot-tools
10751 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
10752 </pre>
10753
10754 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
10755 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
10756 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
10757 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
10758 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
10759 kpartx call.</p>
10760
10761 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
10762 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
10763 the preseed values:</p>
10764
10765 <pre>
10766 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
10767 </pre>
10768
10769 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
10770 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
10771 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
10772 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
10773 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
10774 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
10775
10776 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
10777 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
10778 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
10779 irc.debian.org)</a> and
10780 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
10781 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
10782
10783       </div>
10784       <div class="tags">
10785
10786
10787         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
10788
10789
10790       </div>
10791     </div>
10792     <div class="padding"></div>
10793
10794     <div class="entry">
10795       <div class="title">
10796         <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>
10797       </div>
10798       <div class="date">
10799         12th March 2014
10800       </div>
10801       <div class="body">
10802         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
10803 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
10804 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
10805 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
10806 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
10807 document this better when one of the customers of
10808 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
10809 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
10810 get this working are the following:</p>
10811
10812 <p><ol>
10813
10814 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
10815 example host here.</li>
10816
10817 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
10818 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
10819
10820 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
10821 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
10822
10823 </ol></p>
10824
10825 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
10826 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
10827 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
10828 started).</p>
10829
10830 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
10831 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
10832
10833 <p><blockquote><pre>
10834 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
10835 Export list for nas-server:
10836 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
10837 root@tjener:~#
10838 </pre></blockquote></p>
10839
10840 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
10841 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
10842 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
10843 NFS access.</p>
10844
10845 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
10846 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
10847 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
10848
10849 <p><blockquote><pre>
10850 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10851 </pre></blockquote></p>
10852
10853 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
10854 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
10855 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
10856 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
10857
10858 <p><blockquote><pre>
10859 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10860 objectClass: automount
10861 cn: nas-server
10862 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10863
10864 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10865 objectClass: top
10866 objectClass: automountMap
10867 ou: auto.nas-server
10868
10869 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10870 objectClass: automount
10871 cn: /
10872 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
10873 </pre></blockquote></p>
10874
10875 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
10876 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
10877 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
10878
10879 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
10880 the storage server directly by just visiting the
10881 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
10882 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
10883
10884       </div>
10885       <div class="tags">
10886
10887
10888         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10889
10890
10891       </div>
10892     </div>
10893     <div class="padding"></div>
10894
10895     <div class="entry">
10896       <div class="title">
10897         <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>
10898       </div>
10899       <div class="date">
10900         22nd February 2014
10901       </div>
10902       <div class="body">
10903         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
10904 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
10905 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
10906 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
10907 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
10908 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
10909 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
10910 proper home since then.</p>
10911
10912 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
10913 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
10914 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
10915 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
10916 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
10917
10918 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
10919 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
10920 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
10921 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
10922 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
10923 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
10924 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
10925 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
10926 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
10927
10928       </div>
10929       <div class="tags">
10930
10931
10932         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10933
10934
10935       </div>
10936     </div>
10937     <div class="padding"></div>
10938
10939     <div class="entry">
10940       <div class="title">
10941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
10942       </div>
10943       <div class="date">
10944          3rd February 2014
10945       </div>
10946       <div class="body">
10947         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
10948 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
10949 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
10950 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
10951 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
10952 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
10953 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
10954 <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>,
10955 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
10956
10957 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
10958 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
10959 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
10960 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
10961 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
10962 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
10963
10964 <p><blockquote><pre>
10965 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
10966 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
10967 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
10968 dhclient /dev/eth0
10969 </pre></blockquote></p>
10970
10971 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
10972 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
10973 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
10974
10975 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
10976 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
10977 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
10978 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
10979 side.</p>
10980
10981 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
10982 stuff:</p>
10983
10984 <p><blockquote><pre>
10985 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10986 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
10987 EOF
10988 apt-get update
10989 apt-get dist-upgrade
10990 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
10991     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
10992 update-alternatives --config runsystem
10993 </pre></blockquote></p>
10994
10995 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
10996 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
10997 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
10998 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
10999 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
11000 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
11001 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
11002 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
11003 ssh instead.
11004
11005 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
11006 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
11007 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
11008 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
11009 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
11010 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
11011
11012 <p><blockquote><pre>
11013 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
11014 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
11015 EOF
11016 </pre></blockquote></p>
11017
11018 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
11019 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
11020 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
11021 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
11022
11023 <p><blockquote><pre>
11024 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
11025 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
11026 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
11027 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
11028 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
11029 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
11030 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
11031 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
11032 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
11033 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
11034 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
11035 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
11036 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
11037 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
11038 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
11039 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
11040 #
11041 </pre></blockquote></p>
11042
11043 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
11044 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
11045 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
11046 command line stuff.<p>
11047
11048       </div>
11049       <div class="tags">
11050
11051
11052         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>.
11053
11054
11055       </div>
11056     </div>
11057     <div class="padding"></div>
11058
11059     <div class="entry">
11060       <div class="title">
11061         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
11062       </div>
11063       <div class="date">
11064         29th January 2014
11065       </div>
11066       <div class="body">
11067         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
11068 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
11069 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
11070 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
11071 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
11072 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
11073 investigated in
11074 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
11075 from December 2013, in the article
11076 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
11077 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
11078 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
11079 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
11080 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
11081 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
11082 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
11083 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
11084
11085 <p><blockquote>
11086 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
11087 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
11088 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
11089 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
11090 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
11091 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
11092 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
11093 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
11094 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
11095 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
11096 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
11097 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
11098
11099 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
11100 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
11101 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
11102 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
11103 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
11104 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
11105 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
11106 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
11107 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
11108 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
11109 </blockquote><p>
11110
11111 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
11112 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
11113 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
11114 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
11115 summarized like this:</p>
11116
11117 <p><blockquote>
11118 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
11119 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
11120 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
11121 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
11122 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
11123 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
11124 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
11125 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
11126 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
11127 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
11128 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
11129 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
11130 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
11131 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
11132 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
11133 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
11134 </blockquote></p>
11135
11136 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
11137 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
11138 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
11139 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
11140
11141 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11142 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11143 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11144
11145       </div>
11146       <div class="tags">
11147
11148
11149         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
11150
11151
11152       </div>
11153     </div>
11154     <div class="padding"></div>
11155
11156     <div class="entry">
11157       <div class="title">
11158         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
11159       </div>
11160       <div class="date">
11161         14th January 2014
11162       </div>
11163       <div class="body">
11164         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
11165 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
11166 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
11167 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
11168 the source.  The company behind it provide
11169 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
11170 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
11171 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
11172 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
11173 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
11174 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
11175 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
11176 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
11177 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
11178 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
11179 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
11180 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
11181 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
11182 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
11183 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
11184 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
11185 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
11186 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
11187 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
11188
11189 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
11190
11191 <ul>
11192
11193   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
11194   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
11195   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
11196
11197 </ul>
11198
11199 <p>You can
11200 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
11201 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
11202 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
11203 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
11204 include a test suite check.</p>
11205
11206       </div>
11207       <div class="tags">
11208
11209
11210         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>.
11211
11212
11213       </div>
11214     </div>
11215     <div class="padding"></div>
11216
11217     <div class="entry">
11218       <div class="title">
11219         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
11220       </div>
11221       <div class="date">
11222         25th December 2013
11223       </div>
11224       <div class="body">
11225         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11226 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
11227 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
11228 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
11229 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
11230 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
11231 George</a>.</p>
11232
11233 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
11234
11235 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11236
11237 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
11238 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
11239 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
11240 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
11241 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
11242 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
11243
11244 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
11245 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
11246 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
11247 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
11248 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
11249 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
11250 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
11251 to help building another school's informational education concept from
11252 scratch.</p>
11253
11254 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
11255 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
11256 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
11257
11258 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
11259 and cycling.</p>
11260
11261 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11262 project?</strong></p>
11263
11264 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
11265 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
11266 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
11267 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
11268 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
11269 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
11270
11271 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
11272 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
11273 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
11274 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
11275 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
11276 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
11277 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
11278 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
11279 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
11280
11281 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
11282 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
11283 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
11284 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
11285
11286 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11287 Edu?</strong></p>
11288
11289 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
11290 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
11291 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
11292 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
11293 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
11294 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
11295 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
11296 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
11297 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
11298 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
11299 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
11300 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
11301 that it rocks!</p>
11302
11303 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
11304 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
11305 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
11306 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
11307 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
11308 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
11309 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
11310
11311 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11312 Edu?</strong></p>
11313
11314 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
11315 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
11316 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
11317 can list a few points about that:</p>
11318
11319 <ul>
11320
11321  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
11322  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
11323  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
11324
11325 </ul>
11326
11327 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
11328
11329 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11330
11331 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
11332 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
11333 year.</p>
11334
11335 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
11336 run text tools. I use
11337 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
11338 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
11339 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
11340 based full-featured student management software with the two),
11341 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
11342 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
11343 coloured world called the WWW, I use
11344 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
11345 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
11346 e-mail.</p>
11347
11348 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
11349 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
11350 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
11351 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
11352 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
11353 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
11354 Facebook now ;).</p>
11355
11356 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11357 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11358
11359 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
11360 side is what I have experienced.</p>
11361
11362 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
11363 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
11364 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
11365 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
11366 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
11367 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
11368 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
11369 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
11370 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
11371 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
11372 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
11373 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
11374 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
11375 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
11376 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
11377 plain criminal.</p>
11378
11379 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
11380 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
11381 founded an association named
11382 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
11383 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
11384 area of free and open source software, for example the
11385 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
11386 Teckids and are the youth programme of
11387 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
11388 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
11389 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
11390 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
11391 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
11392 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
11393
11394 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
11395 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
11396 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
11397 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
11398 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
11399 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
11400 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
11401 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
11402 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
11403 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
11404 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
11405 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
11406
11407 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
11408 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
11409 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
11410 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
11411
11412 <!--
11413
11414 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
11415
11416 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
11417 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
11418
11419  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
11420    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
11421    of the decision makers above;
11422  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
11423    knowledge about free software
11424
11425 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
11426
11427 -->
11428
11429       </div>
11430       <div class="tags">
11431
11432
11433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11434
11435
11436       </div>
11437     </div>
11438     <div class="padding"></div>
11439
11440     <div class="entry">
11441       <div class="title">
11442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
11443       </div>
11444       <div class="date">
11445          6th December 2013
11446       </div>
11447       <div class="body">
11448         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
11449 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11450 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
11451 had a new school administrator show up on
11452 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
11453 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
11454 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
11455 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
11456 Germany a few years ago.</p>
11457
11458 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11459
11460 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
11461 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
11462 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
11463 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
11464
11465 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
11466 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
11467 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
11468 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
11469 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
11470 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
11471 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
11472 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
11473 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
11474
11475 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11476 project?</strong></p>
11477
11478 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
11479 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
11480 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
11481 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
11482
11483 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11484 Edu?</strong></p>
11485
11486 <ul>
11487   <li>Quick installation,</li>
11488   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
11489   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
11490   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
11491     single company,</li>
11492   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
11493     experience and problem solutions.</li>
11494 </ul>
11495
11496 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11497 Edu?</strong></p>
11498
11499 <ul>
11500   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
11501   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
11502   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
11503   working again reliably.
11504
11505   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
11506   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
11507   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
11508   as their base.
11509
11510   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
11511   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
11512   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
11513   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
11514   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
11515   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
11516
11517   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
11518   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
11519   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
11520   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
11521   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
11522   schemes.</li>
11523
11524   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
11525   compared to Debian.</li>
11526
11527 </ul>
11528
11529 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
11530 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
11531 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
11532 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
11533
11534 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11535
11536 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
11537 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
11538 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
11539 programming languages for teaching.</p>
11540
11541 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11542 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11543
11544 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
11545
11546 <ul>
11547
11548   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
11549     teaching and learning.</li>
11550
11551   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
11552     home, and at their working place without running into license or
11553     conversion problems.</li>
11554
11555   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
11556     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
11557     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
11558     science, not products.</li>
11559
11560   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
11561     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
11562
11563 </ul>
11564
11565       </div>
11566       <div class="tags">
11567
11568
11569         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11570
11571
11572       </div>
11573     </div>
11574     <div class="padding"></div>
11575
11576     <div class="entry">
11577       <div class="title">
11578         <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>
11579       </div>
11580       <div class="date">
11581         30th November 2013
11582       </div>
11583       <div class="body">
11584         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
11585 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
11586 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
11587 experiment with interesting network technology, the
11588 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
11589 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
11590 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
11591 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
11592 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
11593 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
11594 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
11595 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
11596 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
11597 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
11598 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
11599 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
11600 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
11601 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
11602 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
11603 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
11604
11605       </div>
11606       <div class="tags">
11607
11608
11609         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>.
11610
11611
11612       </div>
11613     </div>
11614     <div class="padding"></div>
11615
11616     <div class="entry">
11617       <div class="title">
11618         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
11619       </div>
11620       <div class="date">
11621         24th November 2013
11622       </div>
11623       <div class="body">
11624         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
11625 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
11626 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
11627 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
11628 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
11629 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
11630 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
11631 is working on.  I checked the
11632 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
11633 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
11634 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
11635 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
11636 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
11637 These are the release notes:</p>
11638
11639 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
11640
11641 <ul>
11642
11643   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
11644    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
11645    up.</li>
11646
11647   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
11648
11649   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
11650    Matthias Klose.</li>
11651
11652   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
11653    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
11654
11655   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
11656    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
11657    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
11658
11659 </ul>
11660
11661 <p>You can
11662 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
11663 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
11664 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
11665 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
11666 include a testsuite check.</p>
11667
11668       </div>
11669       <div class="tags">
11670
11671
11672         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>.
11673
11674
11675       </div>
11676     </div>
11677     <div class="padding"></div>
11678
11679     <div class="entry">
11680       <div class="title">
11681         <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>
11682       </div>
11683       <div class="date">
11684         21st November 2013
11685       </div>
11686       <div class="body">
11687         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
11688 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
11689 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
11690 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
11691 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
11692 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
11693 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
11694 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
11695 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
11696 TED talk
11697 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
11698 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
11699 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
11700
11701 <blockquote>
11702
11703 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
11704 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
11705 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
11706 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
11707 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
11708 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
11709 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
11710 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
11711 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
11712 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
11713 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
11714
11715 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
11716 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
11717 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
11718
11719 </blockquote>
11720
11721 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
11722 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
11723 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
11724 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
11725 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
11726 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
11727 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
11728 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
11729 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
11730
11731       </div>
11732       <div class="tags">
11733
11734
11735         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>.
11736
11737
11738       </div>
11739     </div>
11740     <div class="padding"></div>
11741
11742     <div class="entry">
11743       <div class="title">
11744         <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>
11745       </div>
11746       <div class="date">
11747         13th November 2013
11748       </div>
11749       <div class="body">
11750         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
11751 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
11752 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
11753 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
11754 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
11755 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
11756 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
11757 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
11758 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
11759 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
11760 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
11761 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
11762 right away. :)</p>
11763
11764       </div>
11765       <div class="tags">
11766
11767
11768         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>.
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/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>
11778       </div>
11779       <div class="date">
11780         10th November 2013
11781       </div>
11782       <div class="body">
11783         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
11784 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
11785 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
11786 MR3040 as a mesh node using
11787 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
11788
11789 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
11790 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
11791 and downloaded
11792 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
11793 recommended firmware image</a>
11794 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
11795 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
11796 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
11797 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
11798 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
11799
11800 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
11801 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
11802 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
11803 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
11804 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
11805 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
11806 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
11807 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
11808 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
11809 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
11810 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
11811 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
11812 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
11813
11814 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
11815 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
11816 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
11817 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
11818 them:</p>
11819
11820 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
11821
11822 <pre>
11823
11824 config interface 'loopback'
11825         option ifname 'lo'
11826         option proto 'static'
11827         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
11828         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
11829
11830 config globals 'globals'
11831         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
11832
11833 config interface 'lan'
11834         option ifname 'eth0'
11835         option type 'bridge'
11836         option proto 'dhcp'
11837         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
11838         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
11839         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
11840         option ip6assign '60'
11841
11842 config interface 'mesh'
11843         option ifname 'adhoc0'
11844         option mtu '1528'
11845         option proto 'batadv'
11846         option mesh 'bat0'
11847 </pre>
11848
11849 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
11850 <pre>
11851
11852 config wifi-device 'radio0'
11853         option type 'mac80211'
11854         option channel '11'
11855         option hwmode '11ng'
11856         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
11857         option htmode 'HT20'
11858         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
11859         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
11860         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
11861         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
11862         option disabled '0'
11863
11864 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
11865         option device 'radio0'
11866         option ifname 'adhoc0'
11867         option network 'mesh'
11868         option encryption 'none'
11869         option mode 'adhoc'
11870         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
11871         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
11872 </pre>
11873 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
11874 <pre>
11875
11876 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
11877         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
11878         option 'aggregated_ogms'
11879         option 'ap_isolation'
11880         option 'bonding'
11881         option 'fragmentation'
11882         option 'gw_bandwidth'
11883         option 'gw_mode'
11884         option 'gw_sel_class'
11885         option 'log_level'
11886         option 'orig_interval'
11887         option 'vis_mode'
11888         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
11889         option 'distributed_arp_table'
11890         option 'network_coding'
11891         option 'hop_penalty'
11892
11893 # yet another batX instance
11894 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
11895 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
11896 </pre>
11897
11898 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
11899 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
11900 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
11901
11902       </div>
11903       <div class="tags">
11904
11905
11906         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>.
11907
11908
11909       </div>
11910     </div>
11911     <div class="padding"></div>
11912
11913     <div class="entry">
11914       <div class="title">
11915         <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>
11916       </div>
11917       <div class="date">
11918          2nd November 2013
11919       </div>
11920       <div class="body">
11921         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
11922 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
11923 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
11924 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
11925 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
11926
11927 <p><pre>
11928 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
11929 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
11930 # Provides:          rsyslog
11931 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
11932 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
11933 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
11934 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
11935 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
11936 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
11937 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
11938 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
11939 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
11940 ### END INIT INFO
11941 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
11942 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
11943 </pre></p>
11944
11945 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
11946 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
11947 info/comments.</p>
11948
11949 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
11950 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
11951
11952 <p><pre>
11953 #!/bin/sh
11954
11955 # Define LSB log_* functions.
11956 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
11957 # and status_of_proc is working.
11958 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
11959
11960 #
11961 # Function that starts the daemon/service
11962
11963 #
11964 do_start()
11965 {
11966         # Return
11967         #   0 if daemon has been started
11968         #   1 if daemon was already running
11969         #   2 if daemon could not be started
11970         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
11971                 || return 1
11972         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
11973                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
11974                 || return 2
11975         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
11976         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
11977         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
11978 }
11979
11980 #
11981 # Function that stops the daemon/service
11982 #
11983 do_stop()
11984 {
11985         # Return
11986         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
11987         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
11988         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
11989         #   other if a failure occurred
11990         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
11991         RETVAL="$?"
11992         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
11993         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
11994         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
11995         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
11996         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
11997         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
11998         # sleep for some time.
11999         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
12000         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
12001         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
12002         rm -f $PIDFILE
12003         return "$RETVAL"
12004 }
12005
12006 #
12007 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
12008 #
12009 do_reload() {
12010         #
12011         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
12012         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
12013         # then implement that here.
12014         #
12015         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
12016         return 0
12017 }
12018
12019 SCRIPTNAME=$1
12020 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
12021 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
12022 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
12023     script="$1"
12024     shift
12025     . $script
12026 else
12027     exit 0
12028 fi
12029
12030 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
12031 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
12032
12033 # Exit if the package is not installed
12034 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
12035
12036 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
12037 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
12038
12039 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
12040 . /lib/init/vars.sh
12041
12042 case "$1" in
12043   start)
12044         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
12045         do_start
12046         case "$?" in
12047                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
12048                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
12049         esac
12050         ;;
12051   stop)
12052         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
12053         do_stop
12054         case "$?" in
12055                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
12056                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
12057         esac
12058         ;;
12059   status)
12060         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
12061         ;;
12062   #reload|force-reload)
12063         #
12064         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
12065         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
12066         #
12067         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
12068         #do_reload
12069         #log_end_msg $?
12070         #;;
12071   restart|force-reload)
12072         #
12073         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
12074         # 'force-reload' alias
12075         #
12076         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
12077         do_stop
12078         case "$?" in
12079           0|1)
12080                 do_start
12081                 case "$?" in
12082                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
12083                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
12084                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
12085                 esac
12086                 ;;
12087           *)
12088                 # Failed to stop
12089                 log_end_msg 1
12090                 ;;
12091         esac
12092         ;;
12093   *)
12094         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
12095         exit 3
12096         ;;
12097 esac
12098
12099 :
12100 </pre></p>
12101
12102 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
12103 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
12104 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
12105 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
12106
12107 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
12108 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
12109 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
12110 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
12111 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
12112
12113       </div>
12114       <div class="tags">
12115
12116
12117         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>.
12118
12119
12120       </div>
12121     </div>
12122     <div class="padding"></div>
12123
12124     <div class="entry">
12125       <div class="title">
12126         <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>
12127       </div>
12128       <div class="date">
12129          1st November 2013
12130       </div>
12131       <div class="body">
12132         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
12133 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
12134 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
12135 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
12136 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
12137 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
12138 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
12139 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
12140 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
12141 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
12142 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
12143 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
12144
12145 <p>The source is now available from
12146 <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>
12147
12148       </div>
12149       <div class="tags">
12150
12151
12152         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12153
12154
12155       </div>
12156     </div>
12157     <div class="padding"></div>
12158
12159     <div class="entry">
12160       <div class="title">
12161         <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>
12162       </div>
12163       <div class="date">
12164         27th October 2013
12165       </div>
12166       <div class="body">
12167         <p>The
12168 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
12169 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
12170 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
12171 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
12172 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
12173 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
12174 of a plan to simplify the build system for
12175 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
12176 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
12177 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
12178 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
12179 Raspberry Pi.</p>
12180
12181 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
12182 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
12183 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
12184 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
12185 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
12186 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
12187 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
12188 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
12189 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
12190 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
12191 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
12192 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
12193 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
12194 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
12195 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
12196 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
12197 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
12198 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
12199 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
12200 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
12201 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
12202 available from
12203 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
12204 upstream project page</a>.</p>
12205
12206 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
12207 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
12208 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
12209 list:</p>
12210
12211 <p><pre>
12212 #!/bin/sh
12213 set -e # Exit on first error
12214 rootdir="$1"
12215 cd "$rootdir"
12216 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
12217 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
12218 EOF
12219 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
12220 # install a kernel somewhere too.
12221 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
12222     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
12223 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
12224 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
12225 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
12226 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
12227 </pre></p>
12228
12229 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
12230 to build the image:</p>
12231
12232 <pre>
12233 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
12234     --variant minbase \
12235     --arch armel \
12236     --distribution jessie \
12237     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
12238     --image test.img \
12239     --size 600M \
12240     --bootsize 64M \
12241     --boottype vfat \
12242     --log-level debug \
12243     --verbose \
12244     --no-kernel \
12245     --no-extlinux \
12246     --root-password raspberry \
12247     --hostname raspberrypi \
12248     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
12249     --customize `pwd`/customize \
12250     --package netbase \
12251     --package git-core \
12252     --package binutils \
12253     --package ca-certificates \
12254     --package wget \
12255     --package kmod
12256 </pre></p>
12257
12258 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
12259 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
12260 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
12261 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
12262 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
12263 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
12264 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
12265
12266 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
12267 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
12268 build dependency list.</p>
12269
12270 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
12271 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
12272 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
12273 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
12274
12275       </div>
12276       <div class="tags">
12277
12278
12279         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
12280
12281
12282       </div>
12283     </div>
12284     <div class="padding"></div>
12285
12286     <div class="entry">
12287       <div class="title">
12288         <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>
12289       </div>
12290       <div class="date">
12291         21st October 2013
12292       </div>
12293       <div class="body">
12294         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
12295 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
12296 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
12297 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
12298 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
12299 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
12300 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
12301 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
12302
12303 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
12304 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
12305 instead, I started playing with a
12306 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
12307 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
12308 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
12309 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
12310 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
12311 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
12312 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
12313 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
12314 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
12315 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
12316 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
12317 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
12318 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
12319 every client on the local network.</p>
12320
12321 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
12322 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
12323 and a script
12324 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
12325 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
12326 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
12327 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
12328 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
12329 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
12330 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
12331 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
12332 support.</p>
12333
12334 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
12335 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
12336
12337 <p><pre>
12338 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
12339     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
12340 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
12341 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
12342 %
12343 </pre></p>
12344
12345 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
12346 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
12347 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
12348 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
12349 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
12350 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
12351
12352 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
12353 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
12354 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
12355
12356 <p><table>
12357
12358 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
12359 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
12360 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
12361 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
12362 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
12363 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
12364
12365 </table></p>
12366
12367 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
12368 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
12369 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
12370 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
12371 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
12372 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
12373 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
12374
12375       </div>
12376       <div class="tags">
12377
12378
12379         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>.
12380
12381
12382       </div>
12383     </div>
12384     <div class="padding"></div>
12385
12386     <div class="entry">
12387       <div class="title">
12388         <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>
12389       </div>
12390       <div class="date">
12391         19th October 2013
12392       </div>
12393       <div class="body">
12394         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
12395 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
12396 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
12397 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
12398 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
12399 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
12400 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
12401 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
12402
12403       </div>
12404       <div class="tags">
12405
12406
12407         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>.
12408
12409
12410       </div>
12411     </div>
12412     <div class="padding"></div>
12413
12414     <div class="entry">
12415       <div class="title">
12416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
12417       </div>
12418       <div class="date">
12419         15th October 2013
12420       </div>
12421       <div class="body">
12422         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
12423 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
12424 these. :)</p>
12425
12426 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
12427 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
12428 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
12429 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
12430 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
12431 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
12432 hope you will to. :)</p>
12433
12434 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
12435 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
12436 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
12437 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
12438 donated.  Are you next?</p>
12439
12440 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
12441 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
12442 statement under the heading
12443 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
12444 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
12445 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
12446 too.</p>
12447
12448       </div>
12449       <div class="tags">
12450
12451
12452         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
12453
12454
12455       </div>
12456     </div>
12457     <div class="padding"></div>
12458
12459     <div class="entry">
12460       <div class="title">
12461         <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>
12462       </div>
12463       <div class="date">
12464         11th October 2013
12465       </div>
12466       <div class="body">
12467         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
12468 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
12469 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
12470 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
12471 successful examples like
12472 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
12473 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
12474 (see
12475 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
12476 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
12477 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
12478 can be seen from their
12479 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
12480 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
12481 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
12482 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
12483 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
12484
12485 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
12486 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
12487 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
12488 my recent involvement in
12489 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
12490 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
12491 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
12492 when possible, given that most communication between people are
12493 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
12494 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
12495 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
12496 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
12497 important over the years.</p>
12498
12499 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
12500 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
12501 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
12502 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
12503 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
12504 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
12505 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
12506 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
12507 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
12508 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
12509 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
12510 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
12511 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
12512 speakers about this talk (from
12513 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
12514
12515 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12516
12517 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
12518 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
12519 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
12520 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
12521 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
12522 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
12523 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
12524 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
12525 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
12526 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
12527 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
12528 that project (from
12529 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
12530
12531 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12532
12533 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
12534 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
12535 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
12536 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
12537 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
12538 based community mesh networks.</p>
12539
12540 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
12541 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
12542 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
12543 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
12544 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
12545 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
12546 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
12547 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
12548 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
12549
12550 <p><table>
12551 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
12552 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
12553 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
12554 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
12555 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
12556 </table></p>
12557
12558 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
12559 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
12560 VillageTelco about
12561 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
12562 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
12563 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
12564 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
12565 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
12566 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
12567
12568 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
12569 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
12570 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
12571 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
12572
12573 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
12574 us on IRC, either channel
12575 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
12576 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
12577 irc.freenode.net.</p>
12578
12579 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
12580 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
12581 and Innovation called
12582 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
12583 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
12584 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
12585 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
12586 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
12587 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
12588 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
12589 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
12590
12591 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
12592 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
12593 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
12594 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
12595 mesh system.</p>
12596
12597       </div>
12598       <div class="tags">
12599
12600
12601         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>.
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/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>
12611       </div>
12612       <div class="date">
12613          8th October 2013
12614       </div>
12615       <div class="body">
12616         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
12617 Salvador had published a
12618 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
12619 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
12620 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
12621 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
12622 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
12623 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
12624 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
12625 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
12626 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
12627 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
12628 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
12629 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
12630 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
12631 computers without hard drives by installing one central
12632 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
12633
12634 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
12635
12636 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
12637
12638 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
12639 me know. :)</p>
12640
12641       </div>
12642       <div class="tags">
12643
12644
12645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
12646
12647
12648       </div>
12649     </div>
12650     <div class="padding"></div>
12651
12652     <div class="entry">
12653       <div class="title">
12654         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
12655       </div>
12656       <div class="date">
12657         29th September 2013
12658       </div>
12659       <div class="body">
12660         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
12661 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
12662 complete announcement text can be found at
12663 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
12664 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
12665
12666 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
12667 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
12668 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
12669 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
12670
12671       </div>
12672       <div class="tags">
12673
12674
12675         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12676
12677
12678       </div>
12679     </div>
12680     <div class="padding"></div>
12681
12682     <div class="entry">
12683       <div class="title">
12684         <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>
12685       </div>
12686       <div class="date">
12687         27th September 2013
12688       </div>
12689       <div class="body">
12690         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
12691 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
12692 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
12693 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
12694
12695 <ul>
12696
12697 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
12698 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
12699
12700 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
12701 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
12702
12703 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
12704 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
12705 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
12706 (Youtube)</li>
12707
12708 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
12709 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
12710
12711 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
12712 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
12713
12714 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
12715 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
12716 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
12717
12718 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
12719 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
12720 (Youtube)</li>
12721
12722 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
12723 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
12724
12725 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
12726 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
12727
12728 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
12729 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
12730 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
12731
12732 </ul>
12733
12734 <p>A larger list is available from
12735 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
12736 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
12737
12738 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
12739 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
12740 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
12741 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
12742 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
12743 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
12744 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
12745 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
12746 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
12747 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
12748 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
12749
12750       </div>
12751       <div class="tags">
12752
12753
12754         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
12755
12756
12757       </div>
12758     </div>
12759     <div class="padding"></div>
12760
12761     <div class="entry">
12762       <div class="title">
12763         <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>
12764       </div>
12765       <div class="date">
12766         16th September 2013
12767       </div>
12768       <div class="body">
12769         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12770 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
12771
12772 <blockquote>
12773 <p>Hi,</p>
12774
12775 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
12776 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12777 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
12778
12779 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
12780 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
12781 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
12782 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
12783
12784 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
12785 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
12786
12787 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
12788 compared to beta1:</p>
12789
12790 <ul>
12791
12792 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
12793 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
12794 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
12795 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
12796 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
12797 main server.</li>
12798 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
12799 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
12800 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
12801 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
12802 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
12803
12804 </ul>
12805
12806 <p>Where to get it:</p>
12807
12808 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12809
12810 <ul>
12811 <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>
12812 <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>
12813 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
12814 </ul>
12815
12816 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
12817
12818 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
12819 <ul>
12820 <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>
12821 <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>
12822 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
12823 </ul>
12824
12825 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
12826
12827 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
12828 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
12829 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
12830 as the other isos.</p>
12831
12832 <p>How to report bugs</p>
12833
12834 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
12835 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
12836
12837
12838 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
12839
12840 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
12841 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
12842 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
12843 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
12844 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
12845 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
12846 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
12847 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
12848 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
12849 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
12850 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
12851 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
12852 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12853
12854 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12855 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12856 Squeeze release.</p>
12857
12858 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
12859
12860 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12861 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12862 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
12863 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
12864 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
12865 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
12866 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
12867 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
12868 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
12869 directory.</p>
12870
12871
12872 <p>cheers,
12873 <br>        Holger</p>
12874 </blockquote>
12875
12876       </div>
12877       <div class="tags">
12878
12879
12880         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12881
12882
12883       </div>
12884     </div>
12885     <div class="padding"></div>
12886
12887     <div class="entry">
12888       <div class="title">
12889         <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>
12890       </div>
12891       <div class="date">
12892         10th September 2013
12893       </div>
12894       <div class="body">
12895         <p>I was introduced to the
12896 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
12897 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
12898 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
12899 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
12900 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
12901 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
12902 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
12903 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
12904
12905 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
12906 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
12907 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
12908 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
12909 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
12910
12911 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
12912 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
12913 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
12914 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
12915 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
12916 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
12917 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
12918 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
12919 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
12920 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
12921 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
12922 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
12923 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
12924 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
12925 missing in Debian).</p>
12926
12927 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
12928 scripts
12929 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
12930 and a administrative web interface
12931 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
12932 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
12933 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
12934 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
12935 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
12936 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
12937 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
12938 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
12939 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
12940 this is really working yet, see
12941 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
12942 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
12943 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
12944 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
12945 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
12946 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
12947 with lots of half baked features.</p>
12948
12949 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
12950 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
12951 at.</p>
12952
12953 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
12954
12955 <ol>
12956
12957 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
12958 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
12959 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
12960 to the Debian installer:<p>
12961 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
12962
12963 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
12964 install on.</li>
12965
12966 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
12967 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
12968
12969 </ol>
12970
12971 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
12972
12973 <ol>
12974
12975 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
12976 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
12977 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
12978 <pre>
12979 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
12980 </pre></li>
12981 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
12982 <pre>
12983 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
12984    apt-key add -
12985 apt-get update
12986 apt-get install freedombox-setup
12987 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
12988 </pre></li>
12989 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
12990
12991 </ol>
12992
12993 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
12994 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
12995 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
12996 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
12997 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
12998
12999 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
13000 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
13001 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
13002 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
13003
13004 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
13005 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
13006 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
13007 irc.debian.org and the
13008 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
13009 mailing list</a>.</p>
13010
13011 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
13012 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
13013 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
13014 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
13015 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
13016 default password is 'secret'.</p>
13017
13018       </div>
13019       <div class="tags">
13020
13021
13022         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
13023
13024
13025       </div>
13026     </div>
13027     <div class="padding"></div>
13028
13029     <div class="entry">
13030       <div class="title">
13031         <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>
13032       </div>
13033       <div class="date">
13034         22nd August 2013
13035       </div>
13036       <div class="body">
13037         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13038 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
13039 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
13040
13041 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
13042
13043 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13044 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13045
13046 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13047
13048 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13049 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13050 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13051 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13052 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13053 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13054 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13055 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
13056 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13057 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13058 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13059 desktop contains
13060 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13061 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13062 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13063 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13064
13065 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
13066 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
13067 release.</p>
13068
13069 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
13070 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
13071 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
13072 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
13073 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
13074 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
13075 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
13076 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
13077 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
13078 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
13079 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
13080
13081 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13082
13083 <ul>
13084
13085 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
13086     work also without a attached tty.</li>
13087 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
13088     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
13089     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
13090     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
13091     required).</li>
13092
13093 </ul>
13094
13095 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13096
13097 <ul>
13098
13099 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
13100 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
13101 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
13102 stick ISO image.</li>
13103 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
13104 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
13105 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
13106     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
13107     cope with this.</li>
13108 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
13109 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
13110     empty password hashes.</li>
13111 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
13112     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
13113     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
13114
13115 </ul>
13116
13117 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13118
13119 <ul>
13120
13121 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
13122     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
13123 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
13124     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
13125
13126 </ul>
13127
13128 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13129
13130 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13131
13132 <ul>
13133
13134 <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>
13135
13136 <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>
13137
13138 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
13139
13140 </ul>
13141
13142 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
13143 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
13144
13145 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13146
13147 <ul>
13148
13149 <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>
13150 <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>
13151 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
13152
13153 </ul>
13154
13155 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
13156 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
13157
13158
13159 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13160
13161 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13162
13163       </div>
13164       <div class="tags">
13165
13166
13167         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13168
13169
13170       </div>
13171     </div>
13172     <div class="padding"></div>
13173
13174     <div class="entry">
13175       <div class="title">
13176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
13177       </div>
13178       <div class="date">
13179         18th August 2013
13180       </div>
13181       <div class="body">
13182         <p>Earlier, I reported about
13183 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
13184 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
13185 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
13186 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
13187 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
13188 currently on the disk.</p>
13189
13190 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
13191 <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>
13192 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
13193 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
13194 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
13195 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
13196 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
13197 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
13198 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
13199 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
13200 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
13201 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
13202 the broken disks.</p>
13203
13204       </div>
13205       <div class="tags">
13206
13207
13208         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</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/90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
13218       </div>
13219       <div class="date">
13220          2nd August 2013
13221       </div>
13222       <div class="body">
13223         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
13224 have worked on a Norwegian
13225 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
13226 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
13227 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
13228 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
13229 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
13230 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
13231 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
13232 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
13233 progress of the translation:</p>
13234
13235 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
13236
13237 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
13238 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
13239 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
13240 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
13241 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
13242 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
13243 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
13244 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
13245 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
13246 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
13247 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
13248
13249 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
13250 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
13251 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
13252 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
13253 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
13254 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
13255 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
13256 project files currently available from
13257 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
13258
13259 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
13260 the updated
13261 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
13262 and
13263 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
13264 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
13265 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
13266 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
13267
13268       </div>
13269       <div class="tags">
13270
13271
13272         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>.
13273
13274
13275       </div>
13276     </div>
13277     <div class="padding"></div>
13278
13279     <div class="entry">
13280       <div class="title">
13281         <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>
13282       </div>
13283       <div class="date">
13284         27th July 2013
13285       </div>
13286       <div class="body">
13287         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13288 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13289
13290 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
13291 2013-07-27</strong></p>
13292
13293 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13294 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13295
13296 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13297
13298 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13299 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13300 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13301 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13302 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13303 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13304 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13305 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13306 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13307 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13308 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13309 desktop contains
13310 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13311 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13312 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13313 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13314
13315 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13316 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13317 Squeeze release.</p>
13318
13319 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
13320 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
13321 release.</p>
13322
13323 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13324
13325 <ul>
13326
13327 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
13328    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
13329 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
13330    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
13331    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
13332    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
13333    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
13334 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
13335 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
13336 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
13337    crash bugs.</li>
13338
13339 </ul>
13340
13341 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13342
13343 <ul>
13344
13345 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
13346    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
13347 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
13348    netinst CD.</li>
13349 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
13350    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
13351 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
13352    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
13353    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
13354 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
13355    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
13356    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
13357 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
13358    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
13359    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
13360 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
13361    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
13362 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
13363
13364 </ul>
13365
13366 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13367
13368 <ul>
13369
13370 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
13371 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
13372     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
13373 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
13374
13375 </ul>
13376
13377 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13378
13379 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13380
13381 <ul>
13382
13383 <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>
13384
13385 <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>
13386
13387 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
13388
13389 </ul>
13390
13391 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
13392 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
13393
13394 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13395
13396 <ul>
13397
13398 <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>
13399 <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>
13400 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
13401
13402 </ul>
13403
13404 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
13405 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
13406
13407
13408 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13409
13410 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13411
13412       </div>
13413       <div class="tags">
13414
13415
13416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13417
13418
13419       </div>
13420     </div>
13421     <div class="padding"></div>
13422
13423     <div class="entry">
13424       <div class="title">
13425         <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>
13426       </div>
13427       <div class="date">
13428         17th July 2013
13429       </div>
13430       <div class="body">
13431         <p>Today I switched to
13432 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
13433 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
13434 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
13435 <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
13436 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
13437 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
13438 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
13439 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
13440 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
13441 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
13442 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
13443 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
13444 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
13445 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
13446 station from now on.</p>
13447
13448 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
13449 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
13450 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
13451 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
13452 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
13453 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
13454 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
13455 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
13456 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
13457 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
13458 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
13459 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
13460
13461 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
13462 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
13463 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
13464 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
13465 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
13466 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
13467 parameters are tuned:</p>
13468
13469 <ul>
13470
13471 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
13472     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
13473
13474 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
13475     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
13476     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
13477
13478 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
13479     systems.</li>
13480
13481 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
13482     /etc/fstab.</li>
13483
13484 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
13485
13486 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
13487     cron.daily).</li>
13488
13489 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
13490     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
13491
13492 </ul>
13493
13494 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
13495 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
13496 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
13497 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
13498 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
13499 from getting the data on the disk (see
13500 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
13501 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
13502 right thing to do.</p>
13503
13504 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
13505 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
13506 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
13507
13508 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
13509 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
13510 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
13511 instead of during my work.</p>
13512
13513 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
13514 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
13515
13516 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
13517 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
13518 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
13519
13520 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
13521 there.</p>
13522
13523 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
13524 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
13525 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
13526 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
13527 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
13528 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
13529 back.</p>
13530
13531       </div>
13532       <div class="tags">
13533
13534
13535         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13536
13537
13538       </div>
13539     </div>
13540     <div class="padding"></div>
13541
13542     <div class="entry">
13543       <div class="title">
13544         <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>
13545       </div>
13546       <div class="date">
13547         10th July 2013
13548       </div>
13549       <div class="body">
13550         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
13551 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
13552 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
13553 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
13554 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
13555 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
13556 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
13557 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
13558
13559 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
13560 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
13561 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
13562 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
13563 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
13564 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
13565 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
13566 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
13567 lock up when I download a new
13568 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
13569 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
13570 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
13571
13572 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13573 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
13574 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13575 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
13576 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13577 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13578
13579 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13580 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
13581 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13582 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
13583 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13584 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13585
13586 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
13587 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
13588 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
13589 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
13590 exist).</p>
13591
13592       </div>
13593       <div class="tags">
13594
13595
13596         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13597
13598
13599       </div>
13600     </div>
13601     <div class="padding"></div>
13602
13603     <div class="entry">
13604       <div class="title">
13605         <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>
13606       </div>
13607       <div class="date">
13608          9th July 2013
13609       </div>
13610       <div class="body">
13611         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
13612 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
13613 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
13614 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
13615 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13616 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
13617 Bitraf</a>.</p>
13618
13619 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
13620 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
13621 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
13622 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
13623 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
13624
13625       </div>
13626       <div class="tags">
13627
13628
13629         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>.
13630
13631
13632       </div>
13633     </div>
13634     <div class="padding"></div>
13635
13636     <div class="entry">
13637       <div class="title">
13638         <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>
13639       </div>
13640       <div class="date">
13641          5th July 2013
13642       </div>
13643       <div class="body">
13644         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
13645 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
13646 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
13647 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
13648 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
13649 ended up picking a
13650 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
13651 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
13652 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
13653 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
13654 on that below.</p>
13655
13656 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
13657 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
13658 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
13659 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
13660 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
13661 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
13662 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
13663 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
13664 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
13665
13666 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
13667 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
13668 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
13669 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
13670 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
13671 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
13672 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
13673
13674 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
13675 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
13676
13677 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
13678 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
13679 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
13680 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
13681 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
13682 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
13683 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
13684 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
13685 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
13686 kernel developers as
13687 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
13688 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
13689 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
13690 Lenovo forums, both for
13691 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
13692 2012-11-10</a> and for
13693 <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
13694 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
13695 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
13696 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
13697 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
13698 There is even a
13699 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
13700 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
13701 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
13702
13703 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
13704 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
13705 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
13706 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
13707 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
13708 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
13709 fixed. :)</p>
13710
13711       </div>
13712       <div class="tags">
13713
13714
13715         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13716
13717
13718       </div>
13719     </div>
13720     <div class="padding"></div>
13721
13722     <div class="entry">
13723       <div class="title">
13724         <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>
13725       </div>
13726       <div class="date">
13727          4th July 2013
13728       </div>
13729       <div class="body">
13730         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
13731 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
13732 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
13733 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
13734 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
13735 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
13736 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
13737 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
13738 with an expencive door stop.</p>
13739
13740 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
13741 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
13742 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
13743 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
13744 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
13745 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
13746 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
13747
13748 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
13749 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
13750 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
13751 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
13752 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
13753 new laptop now. :)</p>
13754
13755 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
13756
13757       </div>
13758       <div class="tags">
13759
13760
13761         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13762
13763
13764       </div>
13765     </div>
13766     <div class="padding"></div>
13767
13768     <div class="entry">
13769       <div class="title">
13770         <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>
13771       </div>
13772       <div class="date">
13773          3rd July 2013
13774       </div>
13775       <div class="body">
13776         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13777 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13778
13779 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
13780 2013-07-03</strong></p>
13781
13782 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13783 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13784
13785 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13786
13787 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13788 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13789 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13790 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13791 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13792 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13793 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13794 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13795 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13796 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13797 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13798 desktop contains
13799 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13800 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13801 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13802 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13803
13804 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13805 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13806 Squeeze release.</p>
13807
13808 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13809 <ul>
13810   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
13811   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
13812     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
13813     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
13814   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
13815     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
13816     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
13817   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
13818     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
13819     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
13820     too.</li>
13821   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
13822     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
13823 </ul>
13824 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13825 <ul>
13826   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
13827   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
13828   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
13829     up for some language options.</li>
13830   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
13831   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
13832   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
13833     d-i is doing it.</li>
13834   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
13835     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
13836   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
13837     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
13838     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
13839   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
13840     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
13841   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
13842   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
13843     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
13844   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
13845     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
13846 </ul>
13847 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13848 <ul>
13849   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13850     available yet (698840).</li>
13851   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
13852 </ul>
13853 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13854
13855 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13856 <ul>
13857   <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>
13858   <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>
13859   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
13860 </ul>
13861
13862 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
13863 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
13864
13865 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13866 <ul>
13867   <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>
13868   <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>
13869   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
13870 </ul>
13871
13872 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
13873 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
13874
13875 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13876
13877 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
13878
13879       </div>
13880       <div class="tags">
13881
13882
13883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13884
13885
13886       </div>
13887     </div>
13888     <div class="padding"></div>
13889
13890     <div class="entry">
13891       <div class="title">
13892         <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>
13893       </div>
13894       <div class="date">
13895         25th June 2013
13896       </div>
13897       <div class="body">
13898         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
13899 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
13900 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
13901 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
13902 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
13903 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
13904 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
13905 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
13906 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
13907 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
13908 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
13909
13910 <p><pre>
13911 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
13912 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
13913 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
13914 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
13915 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
13916 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
13917 firmware-ipw2x00
13918 firmware-ipw2x00
13919 Preconfiguring packages ...
13920 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
13921 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
13922 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
13923 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
13924 #
13925 </pre></p>
13926
13927 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
13928 printed instead:</p>
13929
13930 <p><pre>
13931 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
13932 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
13933 #
13934 </pre></p>
13935
13936 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
13937 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
13938
13939 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
13940 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
13941 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
13942 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
13943 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
13944 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
13945 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
13946 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
13947 machine.</p>
13948
13949 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
13950 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
13951 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
13952 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
13953 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
13954 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
13955
13956       </div>
13957       <div class="tags">
13958
13959
13960         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
13961
13962
13963       </div>
13964     </div>
13965     <div class="padding"></div>
13966
13967     <div class="entry">
13968       <div class="title">
13969         <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>
13970       </div>
13971       <div class="date">
13972         22nd June 2013
13973       </div>
13974       <div class="body">
13975         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13976 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
13977 which check that services are running, working, and return the
13978 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
13979 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
13980 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
13981 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
13982 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
13983 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
13984
13985 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
13986 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
13987 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
13988 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
13989 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
13990 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
13991 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
13992 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
13993 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
13994 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
13995 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
13996 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
13997 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
13998 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
13999
14000 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
14001 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
14002 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
14003 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
14004 the problem.</p>
14005
14006 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
14007 please join us on
14008 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
14009 irc.debian.org</a> and the
14010 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
14011 list.</p>
14012
14013       </div>
14014       <div class="tags">
14015
14016
14017         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14018
14019
14020       </div>
14021     </div>
14022     <div class="padding"></div>
14023
14024     <div class="entry">
14025       <div class="title">
14026         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
14027       </div>
14028       <div class="date">
14029         17th June 2013
14030       </div>
14031       <div class="body">
14032         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
14033 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
14034 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
14035 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
14036 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
14037 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
14038 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
14039 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
14040
14041 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14042
14043 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
14044 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
14045 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
14046 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
14047 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
14048 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
14049 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
14050 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
14051 field.</p>
14052
14053 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
14054 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
14055 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
14056 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
14057 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
14058 the only one we have in our country.</p>
14059
14060 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14061 project?</strong></p>
14062
14063 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
14064 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
14065 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
14066 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
14067 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
14068 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
14069 ways to contribute.</p>
14070
14071 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
14072 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
14073 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
14074 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
14075 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
14076 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
14077 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
14078 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
14079 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
14080 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
14081
14082 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14083 Edu?</strong></p>
14084
14085 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
14086 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
14087 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
14088 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
14089 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
14090 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
14091 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
14092 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
14093
14094 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
14095 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
14096 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
14097 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
14098 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
14099 project.</p>
14100
14101 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14102 Edu?</strong></p>
14103
14104 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
14105 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
14106 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
14107 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
14108 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
14109 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
14110 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
14111 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
14112 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
14113
14114 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
14115 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
14116 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
14117 on.</p>
14118
14119 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14120
14121 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
14122 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
14123 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
14124 Enlightenment project a lot!),
14125 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
14126 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
14127 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
14128 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
14129 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
14130
14131 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14132 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14133
14134 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
14135 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
14136 that:</p>
14137
14138 <ul>
14139
14140 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
14141
14142 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
14143     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
14144     of teenagers more?</li>
14145
14146 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
14147     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
14148     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
14149     them!)</li>
14150
14151 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
14152     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
14153     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
14154
14155 </ul>
14156
14157 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
14158 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
14159 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
14160 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
14161 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
14162
14163       </div>
14164       <div class="tags">
14165
14166
14167         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14168
14169
14170       </div>
14171     </div>
14172     <div class="padding"></div>
14173
14174     <div class="entry">
14175       <div class="title">
14176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
14177       </div>
14178       <div class="date">
14179         12th June 2013
14180       </div>
14181       <div class="body">
14182         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
14183 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14184 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
14185 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
14186 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
14187 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
14188
14189 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14190
14191 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
14192 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
14193 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
14194
14195 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
14196 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
14197 each other.</p>
14198
14199 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14200 project?</strong></p>
14201
14202 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
14203 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
14204 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
14205 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
14206 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
14207 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
14208 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
14209 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
14210 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
14211 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
14212 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
14213 we'll get there one day.</p>
14214
14215 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14216 Edu?</strong></p>
14217
14218 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
14219 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
14220 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
14221 very high quality work.</p>
14222
14223 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
14224 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
14225 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
14226 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
14227 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
14228
14229 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14230 Edu?</strong></p>
14231
14232 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
14233 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
14234 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
14235
14236 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
14237 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
14238 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
14239 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
14240 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
14241 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
14242 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
14243 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
14244 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
14245 currently.</p>
14246
14247 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
14248 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
14249 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
14250 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
14251 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
14252 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
14253 autonomous.</p>
14254
14255 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14256
14257 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
14258 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
14259 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
14260 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
14261 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
14262
14263 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
14264 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
14265 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
14266 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
14267 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
14268 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
14269 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
14270 X.</p>
14271
14272 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
14273 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
14274 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
14275 it :p)
14276
14277 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14278 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14279
14280 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
14281 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
14282 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
14283 that.</p>
14284
14285 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
14286 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
14287 advantage of that.</p>
14288
14289 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
14290 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
14291 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
14292 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
14293 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
14294 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
14295 best solution for them.</p>
14296
14297 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
14298 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
14299 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
14300
14301       </div>
14302       <div class="tags">
14303
14304
14305         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14306
14307
14308       </div>
14309     </div>
14310     <div class="padding"></div>
14311
14312     <div class="entry">
14313       <div class="title">
14314         <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>
14315       </div>
14316       <div class="date">
14317         11th June 2013
14318       </div>
14319       <div class="body">
14320         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
14321 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
14322 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
14323 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
14324 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
14325 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
14326 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
14327 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
14328 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
14329 i915 driver used by the
14330 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
14331 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
14332
14333 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
14334 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
14335 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
14336 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
14337 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
14338
14339 <pre>
14340 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
14341 update-initramfs -u -k all
14342 </pre>
14343
14344 <p>Since March 2012 there is
14345 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
14346 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
14347 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
14348 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
14349 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
14350 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
14351 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
14352 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
14353 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
14354 number.</p>
14355
14356 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
14357 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
14358
14359 <p><pre>
14360 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
14361     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
14362     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
14363  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
14364  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
14365     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
14366  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
14367     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
14368  Latency: 0
14369  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
14370  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
14371  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
14372  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
14373  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
14374  Capabilities: <access denied>
14375  Kernel driver in use: i915
14376 </pre></p>
14377
14378 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
14379
14380 <p><pre>
14381 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
14382        ...
14383         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
14384         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
14385        ...
14386 }
14387 </pre></p>
14388
14389 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
14390 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
14391 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
14392 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
14393 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
14394 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
14395 yet shown up in
14396 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
14397 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
14398 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
14399 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
14400 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
14401 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
14402
14403 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
14404 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
14405 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
14406 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
14407 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
14408 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
14409 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
14410 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
14411 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
14412 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
14413 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
14414 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
14415
14416 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
14417 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
14418 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
14419 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
14420 backlight.</p>
14421
14422       </div>
14423       <div class="tags">
14424
14425
14426         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14427
14428
14429       </div>
14430     </div>
14431     <div class="padding"></div>
14432
14433     <div class="entry">
14434       <div class="title">
14435         <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>
14436       </div>
14437       <div class="date">
14438         10th June 2013
14439       </div>
14440       <div class="body">
14441         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14442 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14443
14444 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
14445 2013-06-10</strong></p>
14446
14447 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
14448 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14449
14450 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14451
14452 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14453 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14454 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14455 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14456 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14457 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14458 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14459 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14460 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14461 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14462 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14463 desktop contains
14464 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14465 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14466 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14467 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14468
14469 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14470 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14471 Squeeze release.</p>
14472
14473 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14474
14475 <ul>
14476
14477 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
14478 <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).
14479 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
14480 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
14481 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
14482
14483 </ul>
14484
14485 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14486
14487 <ul>
14488
14489 <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.
14490 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
14491 <li>New Romanian translation.
14492 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
14493 <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).
14494 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
14495 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
14496 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
14497 <li>More testsuite tests.
14498 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
14499 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
14500
14501 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
14502 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
14503
14504 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
14505 them up with GOsa².</li>
14506
14507 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
14508
14509 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
14510 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
14511 entered password). </li>
14512
14513 </ul>
14514
14515 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14516
14517 <ul>
14518
14519 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
14520
14521 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14522 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
14523 missing import feature).</li>
14524
14525 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
14526
14527 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
14528 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
14529 unfixed.</li>
14530
14531 </ul>
14532
14533 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14534
14535 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14536
14537 <ul>
14538
14539 <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>
14540
14541 <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>
14542
14543 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
14544
14545 </ul>
14546
14547 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
14548 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
14549
14550 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14551
14552 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
14553
14554       </div>
14555       <div class="tags">
14556
14557
14558         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14559
14560
14561       </div>
14562     </div>
14563     <div class="padding"></div>
14564
14565     <div class="entry">
14566       <div class="title">
14567         <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>
14568       </div>
14569       <div class="date">
14570          5th June 2013
14571       </div>
14572       <div class="body">
14573         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
14574 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
14575 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
14576 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
14577 the project:
14578
14579 <ol>
14580
14581 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
14582   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
14583   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
14584   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
14585   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
14586
14587 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
14588   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
14589   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
14590   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
14591   #698840</a>.</li>
14592
14593 </ol>
14594
14595 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
14596 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
14597 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
14598
14599       </div>
14600       <div class="tags">
14601
14602
14603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14604
14605
14606       </div>
14607     </div>
14608     <div class="padding"></div>
14609
14610     <div class="entry">
14611       <div class="title">
14612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
14613       </div>
14614       <div class="date">
14615          4th June 2013
14616       </div>
14617       <div class="body">
14618         <p>It has been a while since my last English
14619 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
14620 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
14621 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
14622 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
14623 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
14624
14625 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14626
14627 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
14628 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
14629 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
14630 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
14631
14632 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
14633 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
14634 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
14635
14636 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14637 project?</strong></p>
14638
14639 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
14640 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
14641 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
14642 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
14643 manual.
14644
14645 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
14646 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
14647 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
14648 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
14649
14650 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
14651 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
14652 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
14653 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
14654 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
14655 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
14656 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
14657 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
14658 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
14659 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
14660
14661 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
14662 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
14663 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
14664 beautiful project.</p>
14665
14666 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14667 Edu?</strong></p>
14668
14669 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
14670 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
14671 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
14672
14673 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
14674 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
14675 of educational free software.</p>
14676
14677 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14678 Edu?</strong></p>
14679
14680 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
14681 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
14682 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
14683 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
14684 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
14685
14686 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
14687 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
14688 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
14689 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
14690 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
14691 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
14692 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
14693 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
14694
14695 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14696
14697 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
14698 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
14699 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
14700 also using the mathematical software
14701 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
14702 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
14703 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
14704
14705 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
14706 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
14707 statistics?</strong></p>
14708
14709 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
14710 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
14711 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
14712 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
14713
14714 <ul>
14715
14716 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
14717 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
14718 constructions in planar geometry
14719
14720 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
14721 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
14722 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
14723
14724 </ul>
14725
14726 <p>I like also
14727 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
14728 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
14729 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
14730
14731 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14732 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14733
14734 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
14735
14736 <ul>
14737
14738 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
14739
14740 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
14741     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
14742     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
14743
14744 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
14745
14746 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
14747     system.</li>
14748
14749 </ul>
14750
14751       </div>
14752       <div class="tags">
14753
14754
14755         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14756
14757
14758       </div>
14759     </div>
14760     <div class="padding"></div>
14761
14762     <div class="entry">
14763       <div class="title">
14764         <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>
14765       </div>
14766       <div class="date">
14767          1st June 2013
14768       </div>
14769       <div class="body">
14770         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14771 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
14772 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
14773 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
14774 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
14775 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
14776 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
14777 program.</p>
14778
14779 <!-- 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 -->
14780
14781 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
14782 <p>
14783 <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>
14784 <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>
14785 <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>
14786 <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>
14787 <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>
14788 <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>
14789 <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>
14790 <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>
14791 <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>
14792 <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>
14793 <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>
14794 <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>
14795 <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>
14796 <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>
14797 </p>
14798
14799 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
14800 <p>
14801 <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>
14802 <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>
14803 <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>
14804 <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>
14805 <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>
14806 <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>
14807 </p>
14808
14809 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
14810 <p>
14811 <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>
14812 </p>
14813
14814 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
14815 <p>
14816 <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>
14817 <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>
14818 <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>
14819 <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>
14820 <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>
14821 <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>
14822 <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>
14823 <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>
14824 <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>
14825 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
14826 <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>
14827 </p>
14828
14829 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
14830 <p>
14831 <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>
14832 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
14833 </p>
14834
14835 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
14836 <p>
14837 <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>
14838 <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>
14839 <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>
14840 </p>
14841
14842 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
14843 <p>
14844 <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>
14845 <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>
14846 <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>
14847 <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>
14848 <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>
14849 </p>
14850
14851 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
14852 <p>
14853 <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>
14854 <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>
14855 <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>
14856 <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>
14857 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
14858 <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>
14859 <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>
14860 <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>
14861 <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>
14862 <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>
14863 <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>
14864 <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>
14865 <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>
14866 <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>
14867 <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>
14868 <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>
14869 <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>
14870 </p>
14871
14872 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
14873 <p>
14874 <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>
14875 <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>
14876 </p>
14877
14878 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
14879 <p>
14880 <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>
14881 <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>
14882 <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>
14883 <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>
14884 <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>
14885 <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>
14886 <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>
14887 <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>
14888 <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>
14889 <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>
14890 </p>
14891
14892 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
14893 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
14894 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
14895 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
14896 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
14897 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
14898 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
14899
14900       </div>
14901       <div class="tags">
14902
14903
14904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14905
14906
14907       </div>
14908     </div>
14909     <div class="padding"></div>
14910
14911     <div class="entry">
14912       <div class="title">
14913         <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>
14914       </div>
14915       <div class="date">
14916         27th May 2013
14917       </div>
14918       <div class="body">
14919         <p>Two days ago, I asked
14920 <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
14921 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
14922 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
14923 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
14924 and Windows 8.</p>
14925
14926 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
14927 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
14928 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
14929 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
14930 enough to tell.</p>
14931
14932 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
14933 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
14934 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
14935 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
14936 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
14937 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
14938 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
14939 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
14940 to follow.</p>
14941
14942 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
14943 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
14944 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
14945 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
14946 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
14947 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
14948 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
14949 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
14950
14951 <p>I've updated the
14952 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
14953 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
14954 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
14955 machine.</p>
14956
14957 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
14958 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
14959
14960       </div>
14961       <div class="tags">
14962
14963
14964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14965
14966
14967       </div>
14968     </div>
14969     <div class="padding"></div>
14970
14971     <div class="entry">
14972       <div class="title">
14973         <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>
14974       </div>
14975       <div class="date">
14976         25th May 2013
14977       </div>
14978       <div class="body">
14979         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
14980 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
14981 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
14982 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
14983 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
14984 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
14985
14986 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
14987 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
14988 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
14989 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
14990 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
14991 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
14992 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
14993 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
14994 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
14995 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
14996
14997 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
14998 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
14999 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
15000 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
15001 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
15002 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
15003
15004 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
15005 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
15006 on new Laptops?</p>
15007
15008       </div>
15009       <div class="tags">
15010
15011
15012         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15013
15014
15015       </div>
15016     </div>
15017     <div class="padding"></div>
15018
15019     <div class="entry">
15020       <div class="title">
15021         <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>
15022       </div>
15023       <div class="date">
15024         17th May 2013
15025       </div>
15026       <div class="body">
15027         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
15028 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
15029 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
15030 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
15031 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
15032 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
15033 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
15034 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
15035 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
15036 donate some money</a>.
15037
15038 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
15039 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
15040 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
15041 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
15042 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
15043
15044 <p>The script,
15045 <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/>
15046 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
15047 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
15048 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
15049
15050 <ol>
15051
15052 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
15053 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
15054 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
15055     our configuration.</li>
15056 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
15057     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
15058     according to the profile specified in the config above,
15059     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
15060 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
15061     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
15062 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
15063
15064 </ol>
15065
15066 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
15067 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
15068 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
15069 the needed packages.</p>
15070
15071 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
15072 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
15073 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
15074 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
15075 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
15076 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
15077
15078 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
15079 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
15080 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
15081
15082 <p><pre>
15083 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
15084 DESKTOP="lxde"
15085 </pre></p>
15086
15087 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
15088 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
15089 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
15090 boot.</p>
15091
15092       </div>
15093       <div class="tags">
15094
15095
15096         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>.
15097
15098
15099       </div>
15100     </div>
15101     <div class="padding"></div>
15102
15103     <div class="entry">
15104       <div class="title">
15105         <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>
15106       </div>
15107       <div class="date">
15108         14th May 2013
15109       </div>
15110       <div class="body">
15111         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15112 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
15113 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
15114
15115 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
15116 2013-05-14</strong></p>
15117
15118 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
15119 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
15120 codename "Wheezy".</p>
15121
15122 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15123
15124 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
15125 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
15126 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
15127 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
15128 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
15129 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
15130 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
15131 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
15132
15133 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
15134 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
15135 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
15136
15137 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15138 <ul>
15139   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
15140     default.</li>
15141   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
15142   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
15143   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
15144     ibus-anthy.</li>
15145 </ul>
15146
15147 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15148 <ul>
15149
15150   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
15151     reliability improvements.</li>
15152   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
15153     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
15154   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
15155     problems.</li>
15156   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
15157     direct:// URL.</li>
15158   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
15159   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
15160   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
15161   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
15162     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
15163   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
15164     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
15165 </ul>
15166
15167 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
15168 <ul>
15169
15170   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
15171     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
15172     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
15173   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
15174   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15175     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
15176   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
15177   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
15178   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
15179     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
15180   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
15181     password submission problem
15182     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
15183
15184 </ul>
15185
15186 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15187
15188 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15189 <ul>
15190
15191   <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>
15192   <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>
15193   <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>
15194
15195 </ul>
15196
15197 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
15198
15199 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
15200
15201 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15202
15203 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15204
15205       </div>
15206       <div class="tags">
15207
15208
15209         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15210
15211
15212       </div>
15213     </div>
15214     <div class="padding"></div>
15215
15216     <div class="entry">
15217       <div class="title">
15218         <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>
15219       </div>
15220       <div class="date">
15221         11th May 2013
15222       </div>
15223       <div class="body">
15224         <P>In January,
15225 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
15226 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
15227 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
15228 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
15229 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
15230 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
15231 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
15232 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
15233 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
15234 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
15235 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
15236 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
15237
15238 <p><table>
15239 <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>
15240 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
15241 <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>
15242 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
15243 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
15244 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
15245 <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>
15246 <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>
15247 <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>
15248 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
15249 </table></p>
15250
15251 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
15252 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
15253 available in experimental.</p>
15254
15255 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
15256 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
15257 for LEGO designers.</p>
15258
15259       </div>
15260       <div class="tags">
15261
15262
15263         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
15264
15265
15266       </div>
15267     </div>
15268     <div class="padding"></div>
15269
15270     <div class="entry">
15271       <div class="title">
15272         <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>
15273       </div>
15274       <div class="date">
15275          5th May 2013
15276       </div>
15277       <div class="body">
15278         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
15279 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
15280 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
15281 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
15282 soon.</p>
15283
15284 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
15285 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
15286 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
15287 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
15288 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
15289 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
15290 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
15291 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
15292 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
15293 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
15294 Edu.</a>
15295
15296 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
15297 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
15298 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
15299 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
15300 follow.<p>
15301
15302       </div>
15303       <div class="tags">
15304
15305
15306         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>.
15307
15308
15309       </div>
15310     </div>
15311     <div class="padding"></div>
15312
15313     <div class="entry">
15314       <div class="title">
15315         <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>
15316       </div>
15317       <div class="date">
15318         26th April 2013
15319       </div>
15320       <div class="body">
15321         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
15322 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
15323 announcement:</p>
15324
15325 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
15326 2013-04-26</strong></p>
15327
15328 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
15329 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
15330
15331 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15332
15333 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
15334 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15335 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15336 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
15337 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15338 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15339 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15340 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
15341 installed via the network.</p>
15342
15343 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
15344 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
15345 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
15346
15347 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15348
15349 <ul>
15350 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
15351   <ul>
15352      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
15353      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
15354          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
15355          manual.)</li>
15356      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
15357      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
15358      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
15359      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
15360      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
15361      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
15362      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
15363      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
15364      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
15365      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
15366      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
15367      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
15368          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
15369          manual</a> for more details.</li>
15370      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
15371          installation.</li>
15372      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
15373          <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>
15374   </ul></li>
15375 </ul>
15376
15377 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
15378 <ul>
15379 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
15380     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
15381     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
15382 </ul>
15383
15384 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
15385 <ul>
15386 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
15387     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
15388     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
15389 </ul>
15390
15391 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15392 <ul>
15393 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
15394     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
15395     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
15396 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
15397     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
15398     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
15399 </ul>
15400
15401 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
15402 <ul>
15403 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
15404     yet.</li>
15405 </ul>
15406
15407 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
15408
15409 <ul>
15410 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
15411     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
15412     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
15413 </ul>
15414
15415 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15416
15417 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
15418 <ul>
15419 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
15420 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
15421 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
15422 </ul>
15423
15424 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
15425
15426 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
15427
15428 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15429
15430 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15431
15432       </div>
15433       <div class="tags">
15434
15435
15436         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15437
15438
15439       </div>
15440     </div>
15441     <div class="padding"></div>
15442
15443     <div class="entry">
15444       <div class="title">
15445         <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>
15446       </div>
15447       <div class="date">
15448         16th April 2013
15449       </div>
15450       <div class="body">
15451         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
15452 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
15453 Details about the gathering can be found
15454 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
15455 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
15456 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
15457 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
15458 weekend.</p>
15459
15460 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
15461 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
15462 Edu release.</p>
15463
15464 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
15465
15466       </div>
15467       <div class="tags">
15468
15469
15470         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15471
15472
15473       </div>
15474     </div>
15475     <div class="padding"></div>
15476
15477     <div class="entry">
15478       <div class="title">
15479         <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>
15480       </div>
15481       <div class="date">
15482          3rd April 2013
15483       </div>
15484       <div class="body">
15485         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
15486 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
15487 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
15488 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
15489
15490 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
15491 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
15492 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
15493 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
15494 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
15495 BTS. :)</p>
15496
15497       </div>
15498       <div class="tags">
15499
15500
15501         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
15502
15503
15504       </div>
15505     </div>
15506     <div class="padding"></div>
15507
15508     <div class="entry">
15509       <div class="title">
15510         <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>
15511       </div>
15512       <div class="date">
15513         26th March 2013
15514       </div>
15515       <div class="body">
15516         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
15517 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
15518 font you use when printing.</p>
15519
15520 <p>Three years ago,
15521 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
15522 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
15523 changed their default front from
15524 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
15525 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
15526 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
15527 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
15528 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
15529 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
15530 prints.</p>
15531
15532 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
15533 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
15534 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
15535 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
15536 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
15537 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
15538 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
15539 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
15540 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
15541 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
15542 depend on the documents printed.</p>
15543
15544 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
15545 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
15546 and save some money in the process.</p>
15547
15548 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
15549 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
15550 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
15551 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
15552 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
15553 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
15554 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
15555 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
15556 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
15557
15558       </div>
15559       <div class="tags">
15560
15561
15562         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15563
15564
15565       </div>
15566     </div>
15567     <div class="padding"></div>
15568
15569     <div class="entry">
15570       <div class="title">
15571         <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>
15572       </div>
15573       <div class="date">
15574         24th March 2013
15575       </div>
15576       <div class="body">
15577         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
15578 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
15579 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
15580 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
15581 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
15582 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
15583 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
15584 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
15585 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
15586 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
15587 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
15588 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
15589
15590 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
15591 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
15592 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
15593 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
15594 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
15595 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
15596 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
15597 all I had to do was to use the
15598 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
15599 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
15600 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
15601 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
15602 xsltproc/fop (aka
15603 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
15604 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
15605 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
15606 technical detail.</p>
15607
15608 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
15609 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
15610 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
15611 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
15612 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
15613 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
15614
15615 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
15616 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
15617 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
15618 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
15619 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
15620 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
15621 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
15622 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
15623 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
15624
15625 <p><blockquote><pre>
15626 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15627 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15628   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
15629     &lt;hr/&gt;
15630   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15631 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15632 </pre></blockquote></p>
15633
15634 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
15635
15636 <p><blockquote><pre>
15637 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15638 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15639   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
15640     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
15641       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
15642     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
15643   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15644 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15645 </pre></blockquote></p>
15646
15647 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
15648 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
15649 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
15650 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
15651 enough.</p>
15652
15653 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
15654 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
15655 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
15656 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
15657 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
15658 look like this:</p>
15659
15660 <p><blockquote><pre>
15661 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15662 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15663   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
15664     &lt;br/&gt;
15665   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15666 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15667 </pre></blockquote></p>
15668
15669 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
15670
15671 <p><blockquote><pre>
15672 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15673 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
15674   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
15675   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
15676     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
15677   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15678 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15679 </pre></blockquote></p>
15680
15681 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
15682 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
15683 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
15684 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
15685 page.</p>
15686
15687 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
15688 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
15689 github</a>
15690 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
15691 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
15692 days.</p>
15693
15694       </div>
15695       <div class="tags">
15696
15697
15698         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>.
15699
15700
15701       </div>
15702     </div>
15703     <div class="padding"></div>
15704
15705     <div class="entry">
15706       <div class="title">
15707         <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>
15708       </div>
15709       <div class="date">
15710         17th March 2013
15711       </div>
15712       <div class="body">
15713         <p>Via
15714 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
15715 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
15716 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
15717 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
15718 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
15719 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
15720 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
15721
15722 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
15723 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
15724
15725 <blockquote>
15726 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
15727 </blockquote>
15728
15729 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
15730
15731 <blockquote>
15732 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
15733 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
15734 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
15735 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
15736 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
15737 </blockquote>
15738
15739 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
15740 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
15741 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
15742 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
15743
15744 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
15745 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
15746
15747 <blockquote>
15748 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
15749 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
15750 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
15751 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
15752 </blockquote>
15753
15754 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
15755 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
15756 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
15757 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
15758 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
15759
15760 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
15761 embedding:</p>
15762
15763 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
15764
15765       </div>
15766       <div class="tags">
15767
15768
15769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15770
15771
15772       </div>
15773     </div>
15774     <div class="padding"></div>
15775
15776     <div class="entry">
15777       <div class="title">
15778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
15779       </div>
15780       <div class="date">
15781          8th March 2013
15782       </div>
15783       <div class="body">
15784         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
15785 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
15786 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
15787 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
15788 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
15789 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
15790 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
15791
15792 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
15793
15794 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
15795 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
15796
15797 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
15798 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
15799 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
15800 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
15801 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
15802 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
15803
15804 <p>Images are available for download at
15805 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
15806
15807 <p>md5sums:
15808 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
15809 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
15810 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
15811
15812 <p>sha1sums:
15813 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
15814 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
15815 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
15816
15817 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
15818
15819 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
15820 2013-03-03:</p>
15821
15822 <ul>
15823   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
15824   <ul>
15825         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
15826         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
15827   </ul></li>
15828   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
15829   <ul>
15830         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
15831         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
15832   </ul></li>
15833   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
15834      <ul>
15835         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
15836         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
15837         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
15838                 Closes: #664596</li>
15839         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
15840                 Closes: #664976</li>
15841         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
15842            <ul>
15843                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
15844                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
15845            </ul></li>
15846         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
15847            <ul>
15848                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
15849                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
15850                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
15851                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
15852                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
15853            </ul></li>
15854         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
15855     </ul>
15856   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
15857     <ul>
15858         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
15859     </ul></li>
15860 </ul>
15861
15862 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
15863 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
15864 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
15865 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
15866
15867 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
15868 mailinglist
15869 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
15870 </p></blockquote>
15871
15872 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
15873
15874       </div>
15875       <div class="tags">
15876
15877
15878         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15879
15880
15881       </div>
15882     </div>
15883     <div class="padding"></div>
15884
15885     <div class="entry">
15886       <div class="title">
15887         <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>
15888       </div>
15889       <div class="date">
15890          3rd March 2013
15891       </div>
15892       <div class="body">
15893         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
15894 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
15895 support using
15896 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
15897 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
15898 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
15899 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
15900 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
15901 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
15902 using the GNU LGPL, and
15903 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
15904
15905 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
15906 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
15907 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
15908 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
15909 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
15910 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
15911
15912 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
15913 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
15914 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
15915 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
15916 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
15917 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
15918 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
15919 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
15920 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
15921 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
15922 signal distribution is handled using
15923 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
15924 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
15925 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
15926 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
15927 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
15928 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
15929 them up a bit more first.</p>
15930
15931 <p>The development is coordinated on the
15932 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
15933 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
15934 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
15935 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
15936 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
15937 development.</p>
15938
15939       </div>
15940       <div class="tags">
15941
15942
15943         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>.
15944
15945
15946       </div>
15947     </div>
15948     <div class="padding"></div>
15949
15950     <div class="entry">
15951       <div class="title">
15952         <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>
15953       </div>
15954       <div class="date">
15955         27th February 2013
15956       </div>
15957       <div class="body">
15958         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
15959 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
15960 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
15961 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
15962 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
15963 (where I am the chair of the board) and
15964 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
15965 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
15966 GNU», with this description:
15967
15968 <p><blockquote>
15969 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
15970 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
15971 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
15972 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
15973 </blockquote></p>
15974
15975 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
15976 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
15977 am really curious how many will show up.  See
15978 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
15979 page</a> for the location details.</p>
15980
15981       </div>
15982       <div class="tags">
15983
15984
15985         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
15986
15987
15988       </div>
15989     </div>
15990     <div class="padding"></div>
15991
15992     <div class="entry">
15993       <div class="title">
15994         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html">Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap</a>
15995       </div>
15996       <div class="date">
15997         15th February 2013
15998       </div>
15999       <div class="body">
16000         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
16001 now a great source of free maps available from
16002 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
16003 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
16004 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
16005 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
16006 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
16007 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
16008 page for descriptions).</p>
16009
16010 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
16011 map you can just edit the
16012 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
16013 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
16014
16015       </div>
16016       <div class="tags">
16017
16018
16019         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>.
16020
16021
16022       </div>
16023     </div>
16024     <div class="padding"></div>
16025
16026     <div class="entry">
16027       <div class="title">
16028         <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>
16029       </div>
16030       <div class="date">
16031         12th February 2013
16032       </div>
16033       <div class="body">
16034         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
16035 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
16036 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
16037 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
16038 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
16039 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
16040 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
16041 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
16042 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
16043 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
16044 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
16045 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
16046 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
16047 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
16048 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
16049 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
16050
16051 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
16052 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
16053 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
16054 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
16055 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
16056 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
16057 fields:</p>
16058
16059 <p><pre>
16060 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
16061 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16062 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
16063 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16064 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
16065 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16066 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16067 </pre></p>
16068
16069 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
16070 answer regarding
16071 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
16072 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
16073 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
16074 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
16075
16076 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
16077
16078 <p><pre>
16079 BEGIN:VCARD
16080 VERSION:2.1
16081 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
16082 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
16083 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
16084 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
16085 REV:20130212T095000Z
16086 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
16087 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16088 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16089 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
16090 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16091 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16092 END:VCARD
16093 </pre></p>
16094
16095 <p>The resulting QR code created using
16096 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
16097 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
16098 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
16099 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
16100 system.</p>
16101
16102 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
16103
16104 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
16105 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
16106 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
16107 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
16108
16109 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
16110 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
16111
16112       </div>
16113       <div class="tags">
16114
16115
16116         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>.
16117
16118
16119       </div>
16120     </div>
16121     <div class="padding"></div>
16122
16123     <div class="entry">
16124       <div class="title">
16125         <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>
16126       </div>
16127       <div class="date">
16128         10th February 2013
16129       </div>
16130       <div class="body">
16131         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
16132
16133 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
16134 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
16135 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
16136 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
16137 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
16138 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
16139 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
16140 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
16141 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
16142 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
16143 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
16144
16145 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
16146 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
16147 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
16148 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
16149 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
16150 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
16151 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
16152 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
16153 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
16154 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
16155 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
16156 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
16157 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
16158 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
16159 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
16160 ones own
16161 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
16162 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
16163 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
16164 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
16165 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
16166 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
16167 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
16168 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
16169 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
16170 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
16171 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
16172
16173 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
16174 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
16175 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
16176 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
16177 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
16178 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
16179
16180 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
16181 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
16182 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
16183
16184       </div>
16185       <div class="tags">
16186
16187
16188         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16189
16190
16191       </div>
16192     </div>
16193     <div class="padding"></div>
16194
16195     <div class="entry">
16196       <div class="title">
16197         <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>
16198       </div>
16199       <div class="date">
16200          2nd February 2013
16201       </div>
16202       <div class="body">
16203         <p>My
16204 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
16205 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
16206 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
16207 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
16208 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
16209 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
16210 version too.</p>
16211
16212 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
16213 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
16214 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
16215 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
16216 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
16217 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
16218 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
16219 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
16220
16221 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
16222 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
16223 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
16224 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
16225 it. :)</p>
16226
16227 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
16228 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
16229 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16230
16231       </div>
16232       <div class="tags">
16233
16234
16235         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>.
16236
16237
16238       </div>
16239     </div>
16240     <div class="padding"></div>
16241
16242     <div class="entry">
16243       <div class="title">
16244         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
16245       </div>
16246       <div class="date">
16247         22nd January 2013
16248       </div>
16249       <div class="body">
16250         <p>Yesterday, I
16251 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
16252 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
16253 pluggable hardware devices, which I
16254 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
16255 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
16256 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
16257 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
16258 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
16259 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
16260 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
16261 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
16262 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
16263 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
16264
16265 <pre>
16266 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
16267 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
16268 </pre>
16269
16270 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
16271 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
16272 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
16273 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
16274
16275 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
16276 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
16277 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
16278 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
16279 word.</p>
16280
16281 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
16282 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
16283 process.</p>
16284
16285 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
16286 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
16287
16288       </div>
16289       <div class="tags">
16290
16291
16292         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
16293
16294
16295       </div>
16296     </div>
16297     <div class="padding"></div>
16298
16299     <div class="entry">
16300       <div class="title">
16301         <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>
16302       </div>
16303       <div class="date">
16304         21st January 2013
16305       </div>
16306       <div class="body">
16307         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
16308 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
16309 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
16310 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
16311 it, fetch the
16312 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
16313 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
16314 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
16315 autostart script.</p>
16316
16317 <p>The design is simple:</p>
16318
16319 <ul>
16320
16321 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
16322 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
16323
16324 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
16325 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
16326 initially did.</li>
16327
16328 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
16329 the APT database, a database
16330 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
16331 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
16332
16333 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
16334 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
16335 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
16336 package or packages.</li>
16337
16338 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
16339 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
16340
16341 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
16342 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
16343
16344 </ul>
16345
16346 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
16347 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
16348 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
16349 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
16350
16351 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
16352 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
16353 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
16354 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
16355 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
16356
16357 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
16358 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
16359 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
16360 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
16361 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
16362 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
16363 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
16364 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
16365
16366 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
16367 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
16368 '<tt>svn checkout
16369 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
16370 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
16371 devscripts package.</p>
16372
16373 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
16374 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
16375 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
16376 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
16377 instructions</a> for details.</p>
16378
16379       </div>
16380       <div class="tags">
16381
16382
16383         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
16384
16385
16386       </div>
16387     </div>
16388     <div class="padding"></div>
16389
16390     <div class="entry">
16391       <div class="title">
16392         <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>
16393       </div>
16394       <div class="date">
16395         19th January 2013
16396       </div>
16397       <div class="body">
16398         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
16399 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
16400 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
16401 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
16402 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
16403 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
16404 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
16405 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
16406 not a durable solution.
16407
16408 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
16409 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
16410
16411 <ul>
16412
16413 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
16414   than A4).</li>
16415 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
16416 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
16417 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
16418 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
16419 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
16420 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
16421 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
16422 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
16423 size).</li>
16424 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
16425   X.org packages.</li>
16426 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
16427   the time).
16428
16429 </ul>
16430
16431 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
16432 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
16433 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
16434 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
16435 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
16436 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
16437 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
16438 still be useful.</p>
16439
16440 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
16441 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
16442 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
16443 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
16444 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
16445 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
16446
16447       </div>
16448       <div class="tags">
16449
16450
16451         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16452
16453
16454       </div>
16455     </div>
16456     <div class="padding"></div>
16457
16458     <div class="entry">
16459       <div class="title">
16460         <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>
16461       </div>
16462       <div class="date">
16463         18th January 2013
16464       </div>
16465       <div class="body">
16466         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
16467 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
16468 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
16469 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
16470 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
16471 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
16472 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
16473
16474 <pre>
16475 #!/usr/bin/python
16476 import sys
16477 import apt
16478 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16479     cache = apt.Cache()
16480     cache.open(None)
16481     thepkgs = []
16482     for pkg in cache:
16483         version = pkg.candidate
16484         if version is None:
16485             version = pkg.installed
16486         if version is None:
16487             continue
16488         record = version.record
16489         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
16490             continue
16491         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
16492         for t in mime_types:
16493             t = t.rstrip().strip()
16494             if t == mimetype:
16495                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
16496     return thepkgs
16497 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
16498 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
16499     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
16500 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
16501 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16502     print "  %s" %pkg
16503 </pre>
16504
16505 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
16506
16507 <pre>
16508 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
16509 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
16510   gecko-mediaplayer
16511 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
16512 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
16513   browser-plugin-gnash
16514 %
16515 </pre>
16516
16517 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
16518 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
16519 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
16520 anyone working on adding it?</p>
16521
16522 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
16523 request for icweasel support for this feature is
16524 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
16525 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
16526 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
16527 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
16528
16529       </div>
16530       <div class="tags">
16531
16532
16533         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16534
16535
16536       </div>
16537     </div>
16538     <div class="padding"></div>
16539
16540     <div class="entry">
16541       <div class="title">
16542         <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>
16543       </div>
16544       <div class="date">
16545         16th January 2013
16546       </div>
16547       <div class="body">
16548         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
16549 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
16550 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
16551 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
16552 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
16553 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
16554 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
16555 downloaded by the browser.</p>
16556
16557 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
16558 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
16559 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
16560 can be found on the
16561 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
16562 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
16563 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
16564 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
16565 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
16566
16567 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
16568
16569 <pre>
16570   count MIME type
16571   ----- -----------------------
16572      32 text/plain
16573      30 audio/mpeg
16574      29 image/png
16575      28 image/jpeg
16576      27 application/ogg
16577      26 audio/x-mp3
16578      25 image/tiff
16579      25 image/gif
16580      22 image/bmp
16581      22 audio/x-wav
16582      20 audio/x-flac
16583      19 audio/x-mpegurl
16584      18 video/x-ms-asf
16585      18 audio/x-musepack
16586      18 audio/x-mpeg
16587      18 application/x-ogg
16588      17 video/mpeg
16589      17 audio/x-scpls
16590      17 audio/ogg
16591      16 video/x-ms-wmv
16592 </pre>
16593
16594 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
16595
16596 <pre>
16597   count MIME type
16598   ----- -----------------------
16599      33 text/plain
16600      32 image/png
16601      32 image/jpeg
16602      29 audio/mpeg
16603      27 image/gif
16604      26 image/tiff
16605      26 application/ogg
16606      25 audio/x-mp3
16607      22 image/bmp
16608      21 audio/x-wav
16609      19 audio/x-mpegurl
16610      19 audio/x-mpeg
16611      18 video/mpeg
16612      18 audio/x-scpls
16613      18 audio/x-flac
16614      18 application/x-ogg
16615      17 video/x-ms-asf
16616      17 text/html
16617      17 audio/x-musepack
16618      16 image/x-xbitmap
16619 </pre>
16620
16621 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
16622
16623 <pre>
16624   count MIME type
16625   ----- -----------------------
16626      31 text/plain
16627      31 image/png
16628      31 image/jpeg
16629      29 audio/mpeg
16630      28 application/ogg
16631      27 image/gif
16632      26 image/tiff
16633      26 audio/x-mp3
16634      23 audio/x-wav
16635      22 image/bmp
16636      21 audio/x-flac
16637      20 audio/x-mpegurl
16638      19 audio/x-mpeg
16639      18 video/x-ms-asf
16640      18 video/mpeg
16641      18 audio/x-scpls
16642      18 application/x-ogg
16643      17 audio/x-musepack
16644      16 video/x-ms-wmv
16645      16 video/x-msvideo
16646 </pre>
16647
16648 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
16649 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
16650 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
16651 issues.</p>
16652
16653 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
16654 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
16655
16656       </div>
16657       <div class="tags">
16658
16659
16660         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16661
16662
16663       </div>
16664     </div>
16665     <div class="padding"></div>
16666
16667     <div class="entry">
16668       <div class="title">
16669         <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>
16670       </div>
16671       <div class="date">
16672         15th January 2013
16673       </div>
16674       <div class="body">
16675         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
16676 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
16677 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
16678 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
16679 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
16680 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
16681 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
16682 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
16683 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
16684 packages.</p>
16685
16686 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
16687 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
16688 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
16689 modalias.</p>
16690
16691 <p><blockquote>
16692 Package: package-name
16693 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
16694 </blockquote></p>
16695
16696 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
16697 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
16698
16699 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
16700 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
16701
16702 <p><blockquote>
16703 Package: cheese
16704 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
16705 </blockquote></p>
16706
16707 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
16708 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
16709
16710 <p><blockquote>
16711 Package: pcmciautils
16712 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
16713 </blockquote></p>
16714
16715 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
16716 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
16717
16718 <p><blockquote>
16719 Package: colorhug-client
16720 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
16721 </blockquote></p>
16722
16723 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
16724 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
16725 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
16726
16727 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
16728 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
16729 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
16730 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
16731 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
16732 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
16733 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
16734 Raring.</p>
16735
16736 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
16737 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
16738 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
16739 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
16740 try the
16741 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
16742 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
16743 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
16744 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
16745
16746 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
16747 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
16748
16749 <p><blockquote>
16750 % ./hw-support-lookup
16751 <br>yubikey-personalization
16752 <br>%
16753 </blockquote></p>
16754
16755 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
16756 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
16757
16758 <p><blockquote>
16759 % ./hw-support-lookup
16760 <br>pcmciautils
16761 <br>%
16762 </blockquote></p>
16763
16764 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
16765 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
16766 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
16767
16768 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
16769 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
16770 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
16771 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
16772 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
16773 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
16774 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
16775 see if it work.</p>
16776
16777 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
16778 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
16779 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
16780 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
16781
16782       </div>
16783       <div class="tags">
16784
16785
16786         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
16787
16788
16789       </div>
16790     </div>
16791     <div class="padding"></div>
16792
16793     <div class="entry">
16794       <div class="title">
16795         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
16796       </div>
16797       <div class="date">
16798         14th January 2013
16799       </div>
16800       <div class="body">
16801         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
16802 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
16803 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
16804 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
16805 in
16806 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
16807 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
16808
16809 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
16810
16811 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
16812 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
16813 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
16814 &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;,
16815 &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
16816 &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;.
16817
16818 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
16819 this shell script:</p>
16820
16821 <pre>
16822 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
16823 </pre>
16824
16825 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
16826 using modinfo:</p>
16827
16828 <pre>
16829 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
16830 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
16831 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
16832 %
16833 </pre>
16834
16835 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
16836
16837 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
16838 Bridge memory controller:</p>
16839
16840 <p><blockquote>
16841 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
16842 </blockquote></p>
16843
16844 <p>This represent these values:</p>
16845
16846 <pre>
16847  v   00008086  (vendor)
16848  d   00002770  (device)
16849  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
16850  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
16851  bc  06        (bus class)
16852  sc  00        (bus subclass)
16853  i   00        (interface)
16854 </pre>
16855
16856 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
16857 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
16858 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
16859 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
16860
16861 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
16862 means.</p>
16863
16864 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
16865
16866 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
16867 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
16868
16869 <p><blockquote>
16870 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
16871 </blockquote></p>
16872
16873 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
16874
16875 <pre>
16876  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
16877  p    0001  (device product)
16878  d    0206  (bcddevice)
16879  dc     09  (device class)
16880  dsc    00  (device subclass)
16881  dp     00  (device protocol)
16882  ic     09  (interface class)
16883  isc    00  (interface subclass)
16884  ip     00  (interface protocol)
16885 </pre>
16886
16887 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
16888 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
16889 these alias entries show up:</p>
16890
16891 <p><blockquote>
16892 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
16893 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
16894 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
16895 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
16896 </blockquote></p>
16897
16898 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
16899 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
16900 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
16901
16902 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
16903
16904 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
16905 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
16906
16907 <p><blockquote>
16908 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
16909 </blockquote></p>
16910
16911 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
16912
16913 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
16914
16915 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
16916 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
16917 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
16918
16919 <p><blockquote>
16920 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
16921 </blockquote></p>
16922
16923 <p>The values present are</p>
16924
16925 <pre>
16926  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
16927  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
16928  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
16929  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
16930  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
16931  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
16932  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
16933  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
16934  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
16935  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
16936  ct   10             (chassis type)
16937  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
16938 </pre>
16939
16940 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
16941 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
16942
16943 <pre>
16944   3 Desktop
16945   4 Low Profile Desktop
16946   5 Pizza Box
16947   6 Mini Tower
16948   7 Tower
16949   8 Portable
16950   9 Laptop
16951  10 Notebook
16952  11 Hand Held
16953  12 Docking Station
16954  13 All In One
16955  14 Sub Notebook
16956  15 Space-saving
16957  16 Lunch Box
16958  17 Main Server Chassis
16959  18 Expansion Chassis
16960  19 Sub Chassis
16961  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
16962  21 Peripheral Chassis
16963  22 RAID Chassis
16964  23 Rack Mount Chassis
16965  24 Sealed-case PC
16966  25 Multi-system
16967  26 CompactPCI
16968  27 AdvancedTCA
16969  28 Blade
16970  29 Blade Enclosing
16971 </pre>
16972
16973 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
16974 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
16975 claim it is a desktop.</p>
16976
16977 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
16978
16979 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
16980 test machine:</p>
16981
16982 <p><blockquote>
16983 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
16984 </blockquote></p>
16985
16986 <p>The values present are</p>
16987
16988 <pre>
16989   ty  01  (type)
16990   pr  00  (prototype)
16991   id  00  (id)
16992   ex  00  (extra)
16993 </pre>
16994
16995 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
16996 the valid values are.</p>
16997
16998 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
16999
17000 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
17001 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
17002 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
17003 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
17004 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
17005 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
17006 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
17007
17008 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
17009
17010 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
17011 one can use the following shell script:</p>
17012
17013 <pre>
17014   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
17015     echo "$id" ; \
17016     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
17017   done
17018 </pre>
17019
17020 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
17021 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
17022
17023 <pre>
17024   acpi:ACPI0003:
17025     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
17026   acpi:device:
17027   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
17028   acpi:IBM0068:
17029     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
17030     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
17031     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
17032     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
17033   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
17034     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
17035     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
17036     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
17037   [...]
17038 </pre>
17039
17040 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
17041 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
17042 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
17043 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
17044
17045 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
17046 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
17047 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
17048
17049       </div>
17050       <div class="tags">
17051
17052
17053         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
17054
17055
17056       </div>
17057     </div>
17058     <div class="padding"></div>
17059
17060     <div class="entry">
17061       <div class="title">
17062         <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>
17063       </div>
17064       <div class="date">
17065         10th January 2013
17066       </div>
17067       <div class="body">
17068         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
17069 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
17070 Launcher and updated the Debian package
17071 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
17072 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
17073 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
17074 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
17075 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
17076 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
17077 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
17078 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
17079 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
17080 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
17081 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
17082 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
17083 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
17084 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
17085 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
17086
17087       </div>
17088       <div class="tags">
17089
17090
17091         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
17092
17093
17094       </div>
17095     </div>
17096     <div class="padding"></div>
17097
17098     <div class="entry">
17099       <div class="title">
17100         <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>
17101       </div>
17102       <div class="date">
17103          9th January 2013
17104       </div>
17105       <div class="body">
17106         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
17107 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
17108 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
17109 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
17110 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
17111 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
17112 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
17113 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
17114 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
17115 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
17116 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
17117
17118 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
17119 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
17120 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
17121 simple:
17122
17123 <ul>
17124
17125 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
17126   starting when a user log in.</li>
17127
17128 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
17129   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
17130
17131 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
17132   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
17133   packages.</li>
17134
17135 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
17136   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
17137
17138 </ul>
17139
17140 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
17141 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
17142 discover database to find packages and
17143 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
17144 packages.</p>
17145
17146 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
17147 draft package is now checked into
17148 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
17149 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
17150 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
17151 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
17152 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
17153 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
17154 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
17155 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
17156 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
17157 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
17158 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
17159 because of the freeze).</p>
17160
17161 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
17162 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
17163 inserted):</p>
17164
17165 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
17166
17167 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
17168 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
17169 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
17170
17171 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
17172 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
17173 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
17174 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
17175 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
17176 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
17177 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
17178
17179 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
17180 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
17181 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
17182 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
17183 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
17184 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
17185 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
17186 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
17187 not be installed?</p>
17188
17189 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
17190 please send me an email. :)</p>
17191
17192       </div>
17193       <div class="tags">
17194
17195
17196         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
17197
17198
17199       </div>
17200     </div>
17201     <div class="padding"></div>
17202
17203     <div class="entry">
17204       <div class="title">
17205         <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>
17206       </div>
17207       <div class="date">
17208          2nd January 2013
17209       </div>
17210       <div class="body">
17211         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
17212 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
17213 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
17214 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
17215 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
17216 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
17217 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
17218 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
17219 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
17220 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
17221
17222 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
17223 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
17224 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
17225
17226       </div>
17227       <div class="tags">
17228
17229
17230         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
17231
17232
17233       </div>
17234     </div>
17235     <div class="padding"></div>
17236
17237     <div class="entry">
17238       <div class="title">
17239         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
17240       </div>
17241       <div class="date">
17242         28th December 2012
17243       </div>
17244       <div class="body">
17245         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
17246 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
17247 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
17248 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
17249 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
17250 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
17251 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
17252 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
17253 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
17254 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
17255 followed by many others. :)</p>
17256
17257 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
17258 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
17259 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
17260 you want to donate to the project.</p>
17261
17262       </div>
17263       <div class="tags">
17264
17265
17266         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17267
17268
17269       </div>
17270     </div>
17271     <div class="padding"></div>
17272
17273     <div class="entry">
17274       <div class="title">
17275         <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>
17276       </div>
17277       <div class="date">
17278         25th December 2012
17279       </div>
17280       <div class="body">
17281         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
17282 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
17283
17284 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
17285 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
17286 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
17287 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
17288 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
17289 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
17290 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
17291 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
17292 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
17293 name.</p>
17294
17295 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
17296 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
17297 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
17298
17299 <blockquote><pre>
17300 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
17301 cd bitcoin
17302 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
17303 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
17304 </pre></blockquote>
17305
17306 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
17307 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
17308 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
17309 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
17310 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
17311 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
17312 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
17313 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
17314 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
17315
17316 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
17317 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
17318 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
17319
17320       </div>
17321       <div class="tags">
17322
17323
17324         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>.
17325
17326
17327       </div>
17328     </div>
17329     <div class="padding"></div>
17330
17331     <div class="entry">
17332       <div class="title">
17333         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
17334       </div>
17335       <div class="date">
17336         21st December 2012
17337       </div>
17338       <div class="body">
17339         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
17340 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
17341 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
17342 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
17343 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
17344 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
17345 is now maintained by a
17346 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
17347 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
17348 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
17349 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
17350 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
17351 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
17352 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
17353 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
17354 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
17355 Corallo in a
17356 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
17357 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
17358 Debian package.</p>
17359
17360 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
17361 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
17362 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
17363 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
17364 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
17365 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
17366 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
17367 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
17368 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
17369 new version to unstable.
17370
17371 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
17372 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
17373 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
17374 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
17375 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
17376 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
17377 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
17378 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
17379 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
17380 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
17381 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
17382 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
17383 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
17384 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
17385 have not tested them.</p>
17386
17387 <p>My
17388 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
17389 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
17390 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
17391 years ago, as can be
17392 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
17393 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
17394 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
17395 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
17396 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
17397 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
17398 the same address as last time,
17399 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
17400
17401       </div>
17402       <div class="tags">
17403
17404
17405         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>.
17406
17407
17408       </div>
17409     </div>
17410     <div class="padding"></div>
17411
17412     <div class="entry">
17413       <div class="title">
17414         <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>
17415       </div>
17416       <div class="date">
17417         18th December 2012
17418       </div>
17419       <div class="body">
17420         <p>A few days ago I came across
17421 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
17422 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
17423 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
17424 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
17425 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
17426 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
17427 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
17428 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
17429 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
17430
17431 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
17432 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
17433 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
17434 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
17435
17436 <blockquote><pre>
17437 2004-05-27 Book Store
17438       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
17439       Liabilities:Visa
17440 </pre></blockquote>
17441
17442 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
17443 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
17444 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
17445 Spang</a>,
17446 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
17447 Keen</a>,
17448 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
17449 Cantino</a> and
17450 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
17451 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
17452 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
17453 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
17454 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
17455
17456 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
17457 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
17458 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
17459 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
17460 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
17461
17462 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
17463 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
17464 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
17465 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
17466 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
17467 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
17468 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
17469 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
17470 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
17471
17472       </div>
17473       <div class="tags">
17474
17475
17476         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17477
17478
17479       </div>
17480     </div>
17481     <div class="padding"></div>
17482
17483     <div class="entry">
17484       <div class="title">
17485         <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>
17486       </div>
17487       <div class="date">
17488          6th December 2012
17489       </div>
17490       <div class="body">
17491         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
17492 Oslo</a>, we use the
17493 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
17494 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
17495 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
17496 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
17497 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
17498 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
17499 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
17500 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
17501 Python.</p>
17502
17503 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
17504 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
17505 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
17506 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
17507 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
17508 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
17509
17510 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
17511 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
17512 user currently logged in:</p>
17513
17514 <blockquote><pre>
17515 #!/usr/bin/env python
17516 import getpass
17517 import xmlrpclib
17518 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
17519 username = getpass.getuser()
17520 password = getpass.getpass()
17521 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
17522 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
17523 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
17524 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
17525 result = server.logout(sessionid)
17526 print result
17527 </pre></blockquote>
17528
17529 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
17530 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
17531
17532       </div>
17533       <div class="tags">
17534
17535
17536         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>.
17537
17538
17539       </div>
17540     </div>
17541     <div class="padding"></div>
17542
17543     <div class="entry">
17544       <div class="title">
17545         <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>
17546       </div>
17547       <div class="date">
17548         17th November 2012
17549       </div>
17550       <div class="body">
17551         <p>While working on a
17552 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
17553 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
17554 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
17555 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
17556 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
17557 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
17558
17559 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
17560 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
17561 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
17562 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
17563 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
17564 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
17565 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
17566 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
17567 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
17568 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
17569 arguments.</p>
17570
17571 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
17572 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
17573 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
17574 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
17575 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
17576 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
17577 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
17578 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
17579
17580 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
17581 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
17582 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
17583 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
17584 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
17585 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
17586 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
17587 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
17588 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
17589 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
17590 correct right holder.</p>
17591
17592 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
17593 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
17594 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
17595 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
17596 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
17597 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
17598 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
17599 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
17600 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
17601 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
17602 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
17603 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
17604 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
17605 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
17606
17607 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
17608 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
17609 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.</p>
17610
17611 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
17612 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
17613
17614       </div>
17615       <div class="tags">
17616
17617
17618         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
17619
17620
17621       </div>
17622     </div>
17623     <div class="padding"></div>
17624
17625     <div class="entry">
17626       <div class="title">
17627         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
17628       </div>
17629       <div class="date">
17630         14th November 2012
17631       </div>
17632       <div class="body">
17633         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
17634 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17635 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
17636 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
17637 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
17638 the people behind the German
17639 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
17640 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
17641 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
17642
17643 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17644
17645 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
17646 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
17647 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
17648
17649 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
17650 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
17651 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
17652 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
17653 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
17654 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
17655
17656 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
17657 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
17658 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
17659 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
17660 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
17661 relationship management and the communication processes in the
17662 project.</p>
17663
17664 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
17665 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
17666 and a yoga teacher.</p>
17667
17668 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
17669 project?</strong></p>
17670
17671 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
17672
17673 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
17674 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
17675 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
17676 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
17677 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
17678 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
17679 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
17680 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
17681 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
17682 parents.</p>
17683
17684 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
17685 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
17686 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
17687 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
17688 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
17689 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
17690 Germany.</p>
17691
17692 <p>For information about our school project you can read
17693 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
17694 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
17695
17696 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17697 Edu?</strong></p>
17698
17699 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
17700 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
17701
17702 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
17703 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
17704 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
17705 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
17706 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
17707 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
17708 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
17709 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
17710 teachers, parents...</p>
17711
17712 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17713 Edu?</strong></p>
17714
17715 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
17716 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17717
17718 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
17719 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
17720 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
17721 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
17722 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17723
17724 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
17725 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
17726 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
17727 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
17728 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
17729 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
17730 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17731
17732 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17733
17734 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
17735 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
17736 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
17737 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
17738
17739 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17740 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17741
17742 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
17743 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
17744 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
17745 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
17746 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
17747
17748 <ul>
17749
17750 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
17751 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
17752 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
17753
17754 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
17755 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
17756 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
17757 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
17758 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
17759 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
17760 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
17761
17762 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
17763 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
17764 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
17765 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
17766
17767 </ul>
17768
17769       </div>
17770       <div class="tags">
17771
17772
17773         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17774
17775
17776       </div>
17777     </div>
17778     <div class="padding"></div>
17779
17780     <div class="entry">
17781       <div class="title">
17782         <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>
17783       </div>
17784       <div class="date">
17785          4th November 2012
17786       </div>
17787       <div class="body">
17788         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
17789 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
17790 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
17791 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
17792 see how a member of the bitcoin community
17793 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
17794 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
17795 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
17796 competition.  My thoughts go to the
17797 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
17798 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
17799 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
17800 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
17801 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
17802
17803 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
17804 that the community already seem to have
17805 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
17806 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
17807 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
17808 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
17809 wealth is available.</p>
17810
17811       </div>
17812       <div class="tags">
17813
17814
17815         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>.
17816
17817
17818       </div>
17819     </div>
17820     <div class="padding"></div>
17821
17822     <div class="entry">
17823       <div class="title">
17824         <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>
17825       </div>
17826       <div class="date">
17827         26th October 2012
17828       </div>
17829       <div class="body">
17830         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
17831 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
17832 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
17833 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
17834 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
17835 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
17836 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
17837 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
17838 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
17839 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
17840 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
17841 it every time.</p>
17842
17843 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
17844 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
17845 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
17846 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
17847 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
17848 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
17849 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
17850 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
17851 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
17852 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
17853 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
17854 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
17855
17856 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
17857 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
17858 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
17859 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
17860 article: First the unplanned outage:
17861
17862 <blockquote><pre>
17863 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
17864 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
17865 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
17866 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
17867 Duration:    40 minutes
17868 Scope:       Exchange 2003
17869 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
17870              a cluster failover.
17871
17872 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
17873              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
17874 Technician:  [xxx]
17875 </pre></blockquote>
17876
17877 Next the planned outage:
17878
17879 <blockquote><pre>
17880 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
17881 Severity:    Major (Planned)
17882 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
17883 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
17884 Duration:    10 hours
17885 Scope:       H2 Transport
17886 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
17887              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
17888              4510s.
17889 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
17890              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
17891              connectivity.
17892 Technician:  [xxx]
17893 </pre></blockquote>
17894
17895 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
17896 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
17897 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
17898 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
17899 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
17900 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
17901 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
17902
17903 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
17904 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
17905 university too.  We do register
17906 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
17907 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
17908 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
17909 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
17910 for other sites to consider too?</p>
17911
17912       </div>
17913       <div class="tags">
17914
17915
17916         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
17917
17918
17919       </div>
17920     </div>
17921     <div class="padding"></div>
17922
17923     <div class="entry">
17924       <div class="title">
17925         <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>
17926       </div>
17927       <div class="date">
17928         22nd October 2012
17929       </div>
17930       <div class="body">
17931         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
17932 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
17933 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
17934 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
17935 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
17936 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
17937 background information is available in Norwegian from
17938 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
17939 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
17940 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
17941 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
17942 willing to
17943 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
17944 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
17945 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
17946 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
17947 sounded like
17948 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
17949 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
17950 later.</p>
17951
17952 <p>And thought this action is
17953 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
17954 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
17955 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
17956 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
17957 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
17958 rights.</p>
17959
17960 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
17961 unacceptable terms.  For example
17962 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
17963 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
17964 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
17965 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
17966 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
17967
17968 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
17969 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
17970 restored the account of the user, as reported by
17971 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
17972 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
17973 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
17974 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
17975 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
17976 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
17977 reading two opinions from
17978 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
17979 Phipps</a> and
17980 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
17981 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
17982 details about the original story.</p>
17983
17984       </div>
17985       <div class="tags">
17986
17987
17988         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>.
17989
17990
17991       </div>
17992     </div>
17993     <div class="padding"></div>
17994
17995     <div class="entry">
17996       <div class="title">
17997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
17998       </div>
17999       <div class="date">
18000         18th October 2012
18001       </div>
18002       <div class="body">
18003         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
18004 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
18005 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
18006 across a marvellous drawing by
18007 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
18008 visualising some of what is going on.
18009
18010 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
18011 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
18012
18013 <blockquote>
18014 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
18015 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
18016 </blockquote>
18017
18018 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
18019 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
18020 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
18021 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
18022 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
18023 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
18024
18025       </div>
18026       <div class="tags">
18027
18028
18029         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>.
18030
18031
18032       </div>
18033     </div>
18034     <div class="padding"></div>
18035
18036     <div class="entry">
18037       <div class="title">
18038         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
18039       </div>
18040       <div class="date">
18041         12th October 2012
18042       </div>
18043       <div class="body">
18044         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
18045 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
18046 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
18047 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
18048 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
18049 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
18050 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
18051 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
18052 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
18053 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
18054 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
18055 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
18056 matter".</p>
18057
18058 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
18059 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
18060 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
18061 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
18062 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
18063 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
18064 to argue its side.</p>
18065
18066 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
18067 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
18068 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
18069 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
18070
18071 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
18072 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
18073 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
18074
18075       </div>
18076       <div class="tags">
18077
18078
18079         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>.
18080
18081
18082       </div>
18083     </div>
18084     <div class="padding"></div>
18085
18086     <div class="entry">
18087       <div class="title">
18088         <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>
18089       </div>
18090       <div class="date">
18091          3rd October 2012
18092       </div>
18093       <div class="body">
18094         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
18095 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
18096 the computer science book collection available in his local
18097 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
18098 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
18099 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
18100 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
18101 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
18102 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
18103 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
18104 recently published books.</p>
18105
18106 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
18107 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
18108 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
18109 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
18110 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
18111 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
18112 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
18113 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
18114 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
18115 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
18116 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
18117 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
18118 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
18119 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
18120 for the library that evening.</p>
18121
18122 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
18123 going to know that for example
18124 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
18125 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
18126 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
18127 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
18128 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
18129 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
18130 book right away.</p>
18131
18132       </div>
18133       <div class="tags">
18134
18135
18136         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18137
18138
18139       </div>
18140     </div>
18141     <div class="padding"></div>
18142
18143     <div class="entry">
18144       <div class="title">
18145         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture</a>
18146       </div>
18147       <div class="date">
18148         23rd September 2012
18149       </div>
18150       <div class="body">
18151         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
18152 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
18153 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
18154 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
18155 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
18156 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
18157
18158 When I started, I
18159 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
18160 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
18161 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
18162 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
18163 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
18164 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
18165 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
18166
18167 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
18168
18169 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
18170 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
18171 the project files currently available from
18172 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18173
18174 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18175 the updated
18176 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
18177 and
18178 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
18179 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
18180 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18181 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
18182
18183       </div>
18184       <div class="tags">
18185
18186
18187         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>.
18188
18189
18190       </div>
18191     </div>
18192     <div class="padding"></div>
18193
18194     <div class="entry">
18195       <div class="title">
18196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
18197       </div>
18198       <div class="date">
18199         17th September 2012
18200       </div>
18201       <div class="body">
18202         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
18203 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18204 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
18205 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
18206 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
18207 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
18208 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
18209
18210 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18211
18212 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
18213 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
18214 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
18215 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
18216 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
18217 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
18218 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
18219 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
18220 training is anyway very important</p>
18221
18222 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
18223 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
18224 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
18225 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
18226 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
18227
18228 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18229 project?</strong></p>
18230
18231 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
18232 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
18233 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
18234 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
18235 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
18236 hole.</p>
18237
18238 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18239 Edu?</strong></p>
18240
18241 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
18242 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
18243 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
18244 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
18245 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
18246 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
18247 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
18248 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
18249 hassle.</p>
18250
18251 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18252 Edu?</strong></p>
18253
18254 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
18255 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
18256 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
18257 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
18258 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
18259 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
18260 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
18261 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
18262
18263 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18264
18265 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
18266 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
18267 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
18268 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
18269 has the same...</p>
18270
18271 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
18272 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
18273 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
18274 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
18275
18276 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18277 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18278
18279 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
18280 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
18281 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
18282
18283 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
18284 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
18285 don't.</p>
18286
18287 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
18288 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
18289 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
18290 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
18291 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
18292 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
18293 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
18294
18295       </div>
18296       <div class="tags">
18297
18298
18299         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18300
18301
18302       </div>
18303     </div>
18304     <div class="padding"></div>
18305
18306     <div class="entry">
18307       <div class="title">
18308         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
18309       </div>
18310       <div class="date">
18311         15th September 2012
18312       </div>
18313       <div class="body">
18314         <p>After the
18315 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
18316 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
18317 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
18318 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
18319 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
18320 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
18321 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
18322 was
18323 <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
18324 formal working group should be formed.</p>
18325
18326 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
18327 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
18328 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
18329 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
18330 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
18331 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
18332 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
18333 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
18334
18335 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
18336 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
18337 IETF.</p>
18338
18339       </div>
18340       <div class="tags">
18341
18342
18343         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>.
18344
18345
18346       </div>
18347     </div>
18348     <div class="padding"></div>
18349
18350     <div class="entry">
18351       <div class="title">
18352         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
18353       </div>
18354       <div class="date">
18355         12th September 2012
18356       </div>
18357       <div class="body">
18358         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
18359 publication of of
18360 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
18361 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
18362 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
18363 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
18364 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
18365 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
18366 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
18367 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
18368 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
18369 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
18370
18371 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
18372 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
18373 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
18374 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
18375
18376 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
18377 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
18378
18379       </div>
18380       <div class="tags">
18381
18382
18383         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>.
18384
18385
18386       </div>
18387     </div>
18388     <div class="padding"></div>
18389
18390     <div class="entry">
18391       <div class="title">
18392         <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>
18393       </div>
18394       <div class="date">
18395          7th September 2012
18396       </div>
18397       <div class="body">
18398         <p>As I
18399 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
18400 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
18401 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
18402 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
18403 repository for the project</a>.</p>
18404
18405 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
18406 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
18407 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
18408 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
18409
18410 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
18411 PostScript formats at
18412 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
18413 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
18414
18415       </div>
18416       <div class="tags">
18417
18418
18419         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
18420
18421
18422       </div>
18423     </div>
18424     <div class="padding"></div>
18425
18426     <div class="entry">
18427       <div class="title">
18428         <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>
18429       </div>
18430       <div class="date">
18431         23rd August 2012
18432       </div>
18433       <div class="body">
18434         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
18435 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
18436 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
18437 revisit the great site
18438 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
18439 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
18440 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
18441
18442       </div>
18443       <div class="tags">
18444
18445
18446         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>.
18447
18448
18449       </div>
18450     </div>
18451     <div class="padding"></div>
18452
18453     <div class="entry">
18454       <div class="title">
18455         <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>
18456       </div>
18457       <div class="date">
18458         17th August 2012
18459       </div>
18460       <div class="body">
18461         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
18462 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
18463 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
18464 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
18465 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
18466 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
18467 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
18468 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
18469 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
18470 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
18471 summer I
18472 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
18473 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
18474 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
18475
18476 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
18477 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
18478 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
18479 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
18480 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
18481 progress:</p>
18482
18483 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
18484
18485 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
18486 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
18487 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
18488 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
18489 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
18490 english version of the docbook source.</p>
18491
18492 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
18493 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
18494 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
18495 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
18496 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
18497 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
18498 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
18499 project files currently available from <a
18500 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18501
18502 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18503 the updated
18504 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
18505 and
18506 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
18507 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
18508 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18509 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
18510
18511       </div>
18512       <div class="tags">
18513
18514
18515         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>.
18516
18517
18518       </div>
18519     </div>
18520     <div class="padding"></div>
18521
18522     <div class="entry">
18523       <div class="title">
18524         <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>
18525       </div>
18526       <div class="date">
18527         10th August 2012
18528       </div>
18529       <div class="body">
18530         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
18531 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
18532 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
18533 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
18534 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
18535 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
18536 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
18537 case for the language
18538 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
18539 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
18540
18541 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
18542 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
18543 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
18544 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
18545 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
18546
18547 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
18548 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
18549 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
18550 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
18551 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
18552 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
18553 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
18554 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
18555 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
18556 alias for 'nb'.</p>
18557
18558 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
18559 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
18560 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
18561 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
18562 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
18563 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
18564 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
18565 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
18566 at the same time. :(</p>
18567
18568 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
18569 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
18570 processors. :(</p>
18571
18572 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
18573
18574       </div>
18575       <div class="tags">
18576
18577
18578         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>.
18579
18580
18581       </div>
18582     </div>
18583     <div class="padding"></div>
18584
18585     <div class="entry">
18586       <div class="title">
18587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
18588       </div>
18589       <div class="date">
18590         31st July 2012
18591       </div>
18592       <div class="body">
18593         <p>I tried to send this text to the
18594 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
18595 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
18596 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
18597 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
18598 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
18599 out.</p>
18600
18601 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
18602 learning curve at the moment.</p>
18603
18604 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
18605 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
18606 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
18607 available from
18608 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
18609 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
18610 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
18611 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
18612 Squeeze.</p>
18613
18614 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
18615 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
18616 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
18617 problems.</p>
18618
18619 <ul>
18620
18621 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
18622    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
18623    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
18624    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
18625    index references spanning several pages (See
18626    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
18627    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
18628    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
18629
18630 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
18631    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
18632    #683163</a>).</li>
18633
18634 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
18635    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
18636    footnote and text body, see
18637    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
18638    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
18639    refs listed are not right).</li>
18640
18641 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
18642
18643 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
18644    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
18645
18646 </ul>
18647
18648 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
18649 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
18650 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
18651
18652 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
18653
18654       </div>
18655       <div class="tags">
18656
18657
18658         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>.
18659
18660
18661       </div>
18662     </div>
18663     <div class="padding"></div>
18664
18665     <div class="entry">
18666       <div class="title">
18667         <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>
18668       </div>
18669       <div class="date">
18670         21st July 2012
18671       </div>
18672       <div class="body">
18673         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
18674 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
18675 norwegian version</a> of the book
18676 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
18677 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
18678 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
18679 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
18680 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18681
18682 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
18683 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
18684 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
18685 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
18686 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
18687 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
18688 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
18689 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
18690 print. :)</p>
18691
18692 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
18693 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
18694 language.</p>
18695
18696       </div>
18697       <div class="tags">
18698
18699
18700         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>.
18701
18702
18703       </div>
18704     </div>
18705     <div class="padding"></div>
18706
18707     <div class="entry">
18708       <div class="title">
18709         <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>
18710       </div>
18711       <div class="date">
18712         16th July 2012
18713       </div>
18714       <div class="body">
18715         <p>I am currently working on a
18716 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
18717 to translate</a> the book
18718 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
18719 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
18720 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
18721 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
18722 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
18723 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
18724 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18725
18726 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
18727 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
18728 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
18729 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
18730 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
18731 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
18732 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
18733 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
18734 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
18735
18736       </div>
18737       <div class="tags">
18738
18739
18740         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>.
18741
18742
18743       </div>
18744     </div>
18745     <div class="padding"></div>
18746
18747     <div class="entry">
18748       <div class="title">
18749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
18750       </div>
18751       <div class="date">
18752          9th July 2012
18753       </div>
18754       <div class="body">
18755         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
18756 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
18757 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
18758 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
18759 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
18760 to adjust and scale the just released
18761 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18762 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
18763 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
18764
18765 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18766
18767 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
18768 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
18769 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
18770 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
18771 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
18772 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
18773 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
18774 perspective when working with IT.</p>
18775
18776 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18777 project?</strong></p>
18778
18779 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
18780 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
18781 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
18782 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
18783 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
18784 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
18785
18786 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18787 Edu?</strong></p>
18788
18789 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
18790 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
18791 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
18792 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
18793 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
18794 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
18795 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
18796 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
18797 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
18798 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
18799 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
18800 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
18801 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
18802 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
18803 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
18804 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
18805 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
18806 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
18807 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
18808 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
18809 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
18810 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
18811 quicker to update.
18812
18813 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18814 Edu?</strong></p>
18815
18816 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
18817 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
18818 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
18819 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
18820 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
18821 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
18822
18823 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
18824 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
18825 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
18826 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
18827 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
18828 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
18829 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
18830 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
18831 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
18832 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
18833 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
18834 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
18835 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
18836 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
18837 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
18838
18839 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
18840 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
18841 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
18842 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
18843 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
18844 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
18845 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
18846 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
18847
18848 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
18849 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
18850 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
18851 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
18852 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
18853 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
18854 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
18855 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
18856 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
18857 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
18858 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
18859 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
18860 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
18861 sound file.</p>
18862
18863 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
18864 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
18865 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
18866 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
18867 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
18868 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
18869 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
18870 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
18871 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
18872
18873 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18874
18875 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
18876 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
18877 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
18878 )</p>
18879
18880 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18881 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18882
18883 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
18884 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
18885 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
18886 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
18887 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
18888 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
18889 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
18890 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
18891 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
18892 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
18893 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
18894 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
18895 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
18896 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
18897 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
18898
18899 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
18900 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
18901 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
18902 management with Airtime</a>,
18903 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
18904 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
18905 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
18906 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
18907 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
18908
18909       </div>
18910       <div class="tags">
18911
18912
18913         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18914
18915
18916       </div>
18917     </div>
18918     <div class="padding"></div>
18919
18920     <div class="entry">
18921       <div class="title">
18922         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
18923       </div>
18924       <div class="date">
18925          8th July 2012
18926       </div>
18927       <div class="body">
18928         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
18929 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
18930 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
18931 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
18932 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
18933 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
18934 Steinberg in his blog post
18935 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
18936 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
18937 spending of your tax money.</p>
18938
18939 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
18940 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
18941 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
18942 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
18943 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
18944 purchases.</p>
18945
18946       </div>
18947       <div class="tags">
18948
18949
18950         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18951
18952
18953       </div>
18954     </div>
18955     <div class="padding"></div>
18956
18957     <div class="entry">
18958       <div class="title">
18959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
18960       </div>
18961       <div class="date">
18962          7th July 2012
18963       </div>
18964       <div class="body">
18965         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
18966 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
18967 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
18968 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
18969 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
18970 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
18971 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
18972 receive.  The software is
18973
18974 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
18975 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
18976 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
18977 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
18978 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
18979 Windows</a>.</p>
18980
18981 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
18982 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
18983
18984 <p><ul>
18985
18986   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
18987     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
18988
18989   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
18990     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
18991     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
18992     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
18993     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
18994     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
18995     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
18996     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
18997     </li>
18998
18999   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
19000     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
19001
19002   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
19003     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
19004
19005   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
19006     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
19007
19008   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
19009
19010   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
19011     formats </li>
19012
19013   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
19014     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
19015     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
19016     (as separate sets)</li>
19017
19018   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
19019     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
19020     percentage)</li>
19021
19022   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
19023     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
19024     memory):
19025     <ul>
19026       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
19027       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
19028       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
19029       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
19030       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
19031       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
19032       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
19033       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
19034       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
19035       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
19036           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
19037           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
19038           activity)</li>
19039       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
19040       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
19041     </ul></li>
19042
19043   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
19044     <ul>
19045       <li>Break periods</li>
19046       <li>For teacher(s):
19047         <ul>
19048           <li>Not available periods</li>
19049           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
19050           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
19051           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
19052           <li>Min hours daily</li>
19053           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
19054
19055           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19056             days per week</li>
19057         </ul></li>
19058       <li>For students (sets):
19059         <ul>
19060           <li>Not available periods</li>
19061           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
19062           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
19063           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
19064           <li>Min hours daily</li>
19065           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
19066
19067           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19068             days per week</li>
19069         </ul></li>
19070       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
19071         <ul>
19072           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
19073           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
19074           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
19075           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
19076           <li>End(s) students day</li>
19077           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
19078           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
19079             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
19080           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
19081           <li>Not overlapping</li>
19082           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
19083           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
19084         </ul></li>
19085     </ul></li>
19086
19087   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
19088     <ul>
19089       <li>Room not available periods</li>
19090       <li>For teacher(s):
19091         <ul>
19092           <li>Home room(s)</li>
19093           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
19094           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
19095         </ul>
19096       </li>
19097
19098       <li>For students (sets):
19099         <ul>
19100           <li>Home room(s)</li>
19101           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
19102           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
19103         </ul>
19104       </li>
19105       <li>Preferred room(s):
19106         <ul>
19107           <li>For a subject</li>
19108           <li>For an activity tag</li>
19109           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
19110           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
19111         </ul>
19112       </li>
19113
19114       <li>For a set of activities:
19115         <ul>
19116           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
19117         </ul>
19118       </li>
19119     </ul>
19120   </li>
19121 </ul></p>
19122
19123 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
19124 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
19125 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
19126 manually, check it out.
19127
19128 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
19129 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
19130 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
19131 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
19132 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
19133 section</a>.</p>
19134
19135       </div>
19136       <div class="tags">
19137
19138
19139         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
19140
19141
19142       </div>
19143     </div>
19144     <div class="padding"></div>
19145
19146     <div class="entry">
19147       <div class="title">
19148         <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>
19149       </div>
19150       <div class="date">
19151          3rd July 2012
19152       </div>
19153       <div class="body">
19154         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
19155 project (Norwegian version of
19156 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
19157 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
19158 a problem with the municipalities using
19159 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
19160 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
19161 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
19162 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
19163 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
19164 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
19165 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
19166 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
19167 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
19168 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
19169 the From: header.</p>
19170
19171 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
19172 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
19173 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
19174 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
19175 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
19176 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
19177 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
19178 behaviour.</p>
19179
19180 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
19181 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
19182 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
19183 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
19184 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
19185 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
19186 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
19187
19188       </div>
19189       <div class="tags">
19190
19191
19192         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>.
19193
19194
19195       </div>
19196     </div>
19197     <div class="padding"></div>
19198
19199     <div class="entry">
19200       <div class="title">
19201         <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>
19202       </div>
19203       <div class="date">
19204         26th June 2012
19205       </div>
19206       <div class="body">
19207         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
19208 another interview with the people behind
19209 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
19210 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
19211 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
19212 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
19213 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
19214 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19215 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19216
19217 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19218
19219 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
19220 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
19221 ICT in schools</p>
19222
19223 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19224 project?</strong></p>
19225
19226 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
19227 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
19228 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
19229 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
19230
19231 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19232 Edu?</strong></p>
19233
19234 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
19235 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
19236 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
19237 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
19238
19239 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19240 Edu?</strong></p>
19241
19242 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
19243 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
19244 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
19245 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
19246 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
19247 technologies in school.</p>
19248
19249 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19250
19251 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
19252 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
19253 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
19254
19255 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19256 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19257
19258 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
19259 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
19260 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
19261 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
19262
19263 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
19264 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
19265 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
19266
19267 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
19268 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
19269 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
19270 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
19271 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
19272 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
19273 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
19274 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
19275 working there.</p>
19276
19277       </div>
19278       <div class="tags">
19279
19280
19281         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19282
19283
19284       </div>
19285     </div>
19286     <div class="padding"></div>
19287
19288     <div class="entry">
19289       <div class="title">
19290         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
19291       </div>
19292       <div class="date">
19293         24th June 2012
19294       </div>
19295       <div class="body">
19296         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
19297 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
19298 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
19299 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
19300 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
19301 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
19302 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
19303 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
19304 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
19305 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
19306 missing in my book.</p>
19307
19308 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
19309 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
19310 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
19311 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
19312 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
19313 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
19314 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
19315
19316       </div>
19317       <div class="tags">
19318
19319
19320         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
19321
19322
19323       </div>
19324     </div>
19325     <div class="padding"></div>
19326
19327     <div class="entry">
19328       <div class="title">
19329         <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>
19330       </div>
19331       <div class="date">
19332         11th June 2012
19333       </div>
19334       <div class="body">
19335         <p>During my work on
19336 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
19337 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
19338 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
19339 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
19340 explanation.</p>
19341
19342 <p><ul>
19343
19344 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
19345 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
19346 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
19347 system depend on tasksel tasks in
19348 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
19349 installation.</li>
19350
19351 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
19352 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
19353 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
19354 at least try to enable it for these services:
19355 <ul>
19356
19357   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
19358     quotas.</li>
19359   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
19360   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
19361   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
19362   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
19363   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
19364
19365 </ul></li>
19366
19367 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
19368 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
19369 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
19370 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
19371
19372 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
19373 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
19374 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
19375
19376 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
19377 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
19378 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
19379 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
19380 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
19381 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
19382
19383 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
19384 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
19385 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
19386 in Wheezy.
19387
19388 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
19389 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
19390 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
19391
19392 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
19393 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
19394 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
19395 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
19396
19397 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
19398 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
19399 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
19400 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
19401
19402 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
19403 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
19404 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
19405
19406 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
19407 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
19408 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
19409
19410 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
19411 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
19412 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
19413 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
19414 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
19415
19416 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
19417 <ul>
19418
19419 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
19420 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
19421 <li>and probably more?</li>
19422 </ul></li>
19423
19424 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
19425 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
19426 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
19427 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
19428 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
19429 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
19430 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
19431 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
19432
19433
19434 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
19435 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
19436 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
19437 use.</li>
19438
19439 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
19440 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
19441 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
19442 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
19443 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
19444
19445 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
19446 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
19447 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
19448 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
19449 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
19450 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
19451
19452 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
19453 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
19454 There are at least three implementations,
19455 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
19456 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
19457 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
19458 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
19459 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
19460 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
19461 given room.</li>
19462
19463 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
19464 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
19465 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
19466 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
19467 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
19468 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
19469 investigated.</li>
19470
19471 </ul></p>
19472
19473 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
19474 version.</p>
19475
19476       </div>
19477       <div class="tags">
19478
19479
19480         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19481
19482
19483       </div>
19484     </div>
19485     <div class="padding"></div>
19486
19487     <div class="entry">
19488       <div class="title">
19489         <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>
19490       </div>
19491       <div class="date">
19492          9th June 2012
19493       </div>
19494       <div class="body">
19495         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
19496 <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
19497 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
19498 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
19499 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
19500 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
19501 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
19502 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
19503 be willing to pay for.</p>
19504
19505 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
19506 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
19507 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
19508 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
19509 Orwell</a>.</p>
19510
19511       </div>
19512       <div class="tags">
19513
19514
19515         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>.
19516
19517
19518       </div>
19519     </div>
19520     <div class="padding"></div>
19521
19522     <div class="entry">
19523       <div class="title">
19524         <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>
19525       </div>
19526       <div class="date">
19527          6th June 2012
19528       </div>
19529       <div class="body">
19530         <p>A few days ago
19531 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
19532 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
19533 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
19534 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
19535 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
19536 code for HP, Dell and IBM
19537 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
19538 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
19539 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
19540 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
19541 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
19542
19543 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
19544 output:
19545
19546 <blockquote><pre>
19547 % 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>
19548 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": ""})
19549 %
19550 </pre></blockquote>
19551
19552 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
19553 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
19554 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
19555
19556       </div>
19557       <div class="tags">
19558
19559
19560         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>.
19561
19562
19563       </div>
19564     </div>
19565     <div class="padding"></div>
19566
19567     <div class="entry">
19568       <div class="title">
19569         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
19570       </div>
19571       <div class="date">
19572          2nd June 2012
19573       </div>
19574       <div class="body">
19575         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
19576 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19577 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
19578 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
19579 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19580 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19581
19582 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19583
19584 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
19585 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
19586 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
19587 by Angela).</p>
19588
19589 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
19590 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
19591 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
19592 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
19593 becoming an osteopath.</p>
19594
19595 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
19596 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
19597 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
19598 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
19599 skills with communication skills.</p>
19600
19601 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19602 project?</strong></p>
19603
19604 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
19605 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
19606 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
19607 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
19608 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
19609
19610 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
19611 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
19612 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
19613 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
19614 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
19615 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
19616 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
19617 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
19618 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
19619
19620 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
19621 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
19622 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
19623
19624 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
19625
19626 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
19627 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
19628 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
19629 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
19630 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
19631 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
19632 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
19633 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
19634 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
19635 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
19636 point.</p>
19637
19638 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
19639 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
19640 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
19641 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
19642 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
19643 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
19644
19645 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
19646 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
19647 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
19648 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
19649 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
19650 spare time.</p>
19651
19652 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
19653 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
19654 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
19655 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
19656 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
19657
19658 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
19659 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
19660 avoidance do exist.</p>
19661
19662 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
19663 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
19664 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
19665 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
19666 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
19667 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
19668 and probably a gain for all.</p>
19669
19670 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19671 Edu?</strong></p>
19672
19673 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
19674 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
19675 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
19676 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
19677 project communication, honest communication within the group of
19678 developers, etc.</p>
19679
19680 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19681 Edu?</strong></p>
19682
19683 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
19684
19685 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
19686 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
19687 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
19688 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
19689 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
19690 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
19691 contribute).</p>
19692
19693 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
19694 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
19695 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
19696 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
19697 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
19698 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
19699 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
19700 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
19701 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
19702 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
19703
19704 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19705
19706 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
19707
19708 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
19709 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
19710 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
19711
19712 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
19713 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
19714 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
19715 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
19716
19717 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
19718 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
19719 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
19720 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
19721 whiteboard.</p>
19722
19723 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
19724
19725 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19726 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19727
19728 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
19729 enrol people.</p>
19730
19731       </div>
19732       <div class="tags">
19733
19734
19735         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19736
19737
19738       </div>
19739     </div>
19740     <div class="padding"></div>
19741
19742     <div class="entry">
19743       <div class="title">
19744         <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>
19745       </div>
19746       <div class="date">
19747          1st June 2012
19748       </div>
19749       <div class="body">
19750         <p>A few years ago I wrote
19751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
19752 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
19753 I have learned from colleges here at the
19754 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
19755 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
19756 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
19757 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
19758 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
19759
19760 <p><pre>
19761 use strict;
19762 use warnings;
19763 use SOAP::Lite;
19764 use Data::Dumper;
19765 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
19766 my $App = 'test';
19767 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
19768 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
19769 my $s = SOAP::Lite
19770     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
19771     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
19772     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
19773     ;
19774 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
19775     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
19776     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
19777     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
19778 );
19779 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
19780 </pre></p>
19781
19782 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
19783
19784 <p><pre>
19785 $VAR1 = {
19786           'Asset' => {
19787                      'Entitlements' => {
19788                                        'EntitlementData' => [
19789                                                             {
19790                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19791                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
19792                                                               'Provider' => '',
19793                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19794                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19795                                                             },
19796                                                             {
19797                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19798                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
19799                                                               'Provider' => '',
19800                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19801                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19802                                                             },
19803                                                             {
19804                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19805                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
19806                                                               'Provider' => '',
19807                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19808                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19809                                                             }
19810                                                           ]
19811                                      },
19812                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
19813                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
19814                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
19815                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
19816                                           'Buid' => '2323',
19817                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
19818                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
19819                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
19820                                         }
19821                    }
19822         };
19823 </pre></p>
19824
19825 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
19826 service outside the
19827 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
19828 documentation</a>, and according to
19829 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
19830 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
19831 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
19832
19833 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
19834 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
19835
19836       </div>
19837       <div class="tags">
19838
19839
19840         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>.
19841
19842
19843       </div>
19844     </div>
19845     <div class="padding"></div>
19846
19847     <div class="entry">
19848       <div class="title">
19849         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
19850       </div>
19851       <div class="date">
19852         31st May 2012
19853       </div>
19854       <div class="body">
19855         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
19856 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
19857 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
19858 running Debian Squeeze, where
19859 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
19860 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
19861 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
19862 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
19863 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
19864 another day.</p>
19865
19866 <p>After calibration, I get a
19867 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
19868 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
19869 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
19870 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
19871 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
19872 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
19873 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
19874 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
19875 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
19876 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
19877 and a simple</p>
19878
19879 <p><pre>
19880 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
19881 </pre></p>
19882
19883 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
19884 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
19885 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
19886 enough for now.</p>
19887
19888       </div>
19889       <div class="tags">
19890
19891
19892         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19893
19894
19895       </div>
19896     </div>
19897     <div class="padding"></div>
19898
19899     <div class="entry">
19900       <div class="title">
19901         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
19902       </div>
19903       <div class="date">
19904         27th May 2012
19905       </div>
19906       <div class="body">
19907         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
19908 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19909 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
19910 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
19911 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
19912 since then, helping to make sure the
19913 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19914 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
19915
19916 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19917
19918 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
19919 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
19920 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
19921 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
19922 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
19923 our computer network.</p>
19924
19925 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
19926 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
19927 (4 months).</p>
19928
19929 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19930 project?</strong></p>
19931
19932 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
19933 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
19934 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
19935 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
19936 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
19937 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
19938 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
19939 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
19940 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
19941 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
19942 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
19943 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
19944 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
19945 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
19946
19947 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19948 Edu?</strong></p>
19949
19950 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
19951 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
19952 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
19953 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
19954 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
19955 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
19956 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
19957 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
19958
19959 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19960 Edu?</strong></p>
19961
19962 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
19963 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
19964 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
19965 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
19966 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
19967 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
19968 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
19969 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
19970 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
19971 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
19972 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
19973 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
19974
19975 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19976
19977 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
19978 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
19979 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
19980
19981 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19982 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19983
19984 <p><ol>
19985
19986 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
19987 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
19988 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
19989 developing.</li>
19990
19991 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
19992 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
19993 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
19994 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
19995 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
19996
19997 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
19998 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
19999 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
20000
20001 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
20002 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
20003 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
20004 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
20005
20006 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
20007 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
20008 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
20009
20010 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
20011
20012 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
20013 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
20014 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
20015 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
20016
20017 </ol></p>
20018
20019       </div>
20020       <div class="tags">
20021
20022
20023         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20024
20025
20026       </div>
20027     </div>
20028     <div class="padding"></div>
20029
20030     <div class="entry">
20031       <div class="title">
20032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
20033       </div>
20034       <div class="date">
20035         26th May 2012
20036       </div>
20037       <div class="body">
20038         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
20039 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
20040 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
20041 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
20042 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
20043
20044 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
20045 <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>
20046 comment:</p>
20047
20048 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
20049 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
20050 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
20051 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
20052 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
20053 </blockquote></p>
20054
20055 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
20056 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
20057 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
20058 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
20059 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
20060 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
20061 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
20062 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
20063 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
20064 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
20065 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
20066 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
20067 of wasted effort.</p>
20068
20069 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
20070 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
20071 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
20072
20073 <p>See
20074 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
20075 and
20076 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
20077 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
20078 </blockquote></p>
20079
20080       </div>
20081       <div class="tags">
20082
20083
20084         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>.
20085
20086
20087       </div>
20088     </div>
20089     <div class="padding"></div>
20090
20091     <div class="entry">
20092       <div class="title">
20093         <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>
20094       </div>
20095       <div class="date">
20096         18th May 2012
20097       </div>
20098       <div class="body">
20099         <p>In january, I
20100 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
20101 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
20102 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
20103 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
20104 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
20105 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
20106 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
20107 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
20108 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
20109 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
20110
20111 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
20112 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
20113 drivers. :)</p>
20114
20115       </div>
20116       <div class="tags">
20117
20118
20119         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20120
20121
20122       </div>
20123     </div>
20124     <div class="padding"></div>
20125
20126     <div class="entry">
20127       <div class="title">
20128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
20129       </div>
20130       <div class="date">
20131         13th May 2012
20132       </div>
20133       <div class="body">
20134         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
20135 publish another interview with the people behind
20136 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
20137 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
20138 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
20139 details get right before release.
20140
20141 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20142
20143 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
20144 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
20145 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
20146 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
20147 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
20148 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
20149 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
20150 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
20151
20152 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
20153 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
20154 home since 2006.</p>
20155
20156 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20157 project?</strong></p>
20158
20159 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
20160 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
20161 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
20162 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
20163 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
20164 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
20165
20166 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
20167 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
20168 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
20169 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
20170 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
20171 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
20172 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
20173 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
20174 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
20175 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
20176 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
20177 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
20178 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
20179 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
20180 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
20181 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
20182
20183 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20184 Edu?</strong></p>
20185
20186 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
20187 for me as today.</p>
20188
20189 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
20190
20191 <p><ul>
20192
20193 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
20194 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
20195
20196 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
20197 cost.</li>
20198
20199 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
20200 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
20201 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
20202 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
20203 server</li>
20204
20205 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
20206 school.</li>
20207
20208 </ul></p>
20209
20210 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
20211 came up in this way:</p>
20212
20213 <p><ul>
20214
20215 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
20216 now.</li>
20217
20218 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
20219 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
20220 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
20221
20222 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
20223 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
20224 interfaces used in the past.</li>
20225
20226 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
20227 different needs.</li>
20228
20229 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
20230
20231 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
20232 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
20233 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
20234
20235 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
20236 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
20237
20238 </ul></p>
20239
20240 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20241 Edu?</strong></p>
20242
20243 <p><ul>
20244
20245 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
20246 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
20247 whole municipality areas.</li>
20248
20249 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
20250 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
20251 politicians.</li>
20252
20253 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
20254
20255 </ul></p>
20256
20257 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20258
20259 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
20260 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
20261 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
20262 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
20263 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
20264 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
20265
20266 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
20267 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
20268 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
20269 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
20270 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
20271
20272 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20273 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20274
20275 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
20276 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
20277 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
20278
20279       </div>
20280       <div class="tags">
20281
20282
20283         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20284
20285
20286       </div>
20287     </div>
20288     <div class="padding"></div>
20289
20290     <div class="entry">
20291       <div class="title">
20292         <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>
20293       </div>
20294       <div class="date">
20295         30th April 2012
20296       </div>
20297       <div class="body">
20298         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
20299 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
20300
20301 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
20302 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
20303 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
20304 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
20305 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
20306 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
20307 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
20308 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
20309 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
20310 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
20311 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
20312 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
20313 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
20314 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
20315 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
20316 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
20317
20318 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
20319 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
20320 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
20321 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
20322 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
20323 finally found a Danish supplier
20324 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
20325 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
20326 days ago.</p>
20327
20328 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
20329 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
20330 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
20331 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
20332 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
20333 toys.</p>
20334
20335       </div>
20336       <div class="tags">
20337
20338
20339         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20340
20341
20342       </div>
20343     </div>
20344     <div class="padding"></div>
20345
20346     <div class="entry">
20347       <div class="title">
20348         <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>
20349       </div>
20350       <div class="date">
20351         26th April 2012
20352       </div>
20353       <div class="body">
20354         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
20355 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
20356 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
20357 that the video editor application included with
20358 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
20359 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
20360 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
20361
20362 <p><blockquote>
20363 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
20364 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
20365 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
20366 </blockquote></p>
20367
20368 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
20369
20370 <p><blockquote>
20371 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
20372 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
20373 </blockquote></p>
20374
20375 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
20376 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
20377 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
20378 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
20379 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
20380 video.  AMR is
20381 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
20382 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
20383 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
20384 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
20385 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
20386 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
20387 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
20388
20389 <p>I know why I prefer
20390 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
20391 standards</a> also for video.</p>
20392
20393       </div>
20394       <div class="tags">
20395
20396
20397         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
20398
20399
20400       </div>
20401     </div>
20402     <div class="padding"></div>
20403
20404     <div class="entry">
20405       <div class="title">
20406         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
20407       </div>
20408       <div class="date">
20409         19th April 2012
20410       </div>
20411       <div class="body">
20412         <p>Here in Norway, the
20413 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
20414 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
20415 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
20416 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
20417 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
20418 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
20419 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
20420 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
20421 on the same level.</p>
20422
20423 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
20424 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
20425 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
20426 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
20427 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
20428 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
20429 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
20430 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
20431 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
20432 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
20433 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
20434 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
20435 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
20436 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
20437 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
20438 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
20439 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
20440 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
20441
20442 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
20443 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
20444 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
20445 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
20446 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
20447 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
20448 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
20449 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
20450
20451 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
20452 from Simon Phipps
20453 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
20454 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
20455
20456 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
20457 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
20458 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
20459 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
20460 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
20461 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
20462 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
20463 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
20464 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
20465
20466       </div>
20467       <div class="tags">
20468
20469
20470         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>.
20471
20472
20473       </div>
20474     </div>
20475     <div class="padding"></div>
20476
20477     <div class="entry">
20478       <div class="title">
20479         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
20480       </div>
20481       <div class="date">
20482         15th April 2012
20483       </div>
20484       <div class="body">
20485         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
20486 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
20487 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
20488 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
20489 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
20490 up in the recently released
20491 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20492 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
20493
20494 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20495
20496 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
20497 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
20498 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
20499 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
20500 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
20501 information technology and science/technology.</p>
20502
20503 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20504 project?</strong></p>
20505
20506 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
20507 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
20508 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
20509 contributing.</p>
20510
20511 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20512 Edu?</strong></p>
20513
20514 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
20515 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
20516 Debian Project!</p>
20517
20518 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20519 Edu?</strong></p>
20520
20521 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
20522 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
20523 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
20524 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
20525 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
20526 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
20527 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
20528
20529 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
20530 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
20531
20532 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20533
20534 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
20535 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
20536 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
20537 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
20538
20539 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20540 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20541
20542 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
20543 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
20544 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
20545 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
20546 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
20547 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
20548 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
20549
20550 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
20551 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
20552 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
20553 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
20554 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
20555 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
20556 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
20557 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
20558
20559       </div>
20560       <div class="tags">
20561
20562
20563         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20564
20565
20566       </div>
20567     </div>
20568     <div class="padding"></div>
20569
20570     <div class="entry">
20571       <div class="title">
20572         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
20573       </div>
20574       <div class="date">
20575          8th April 2012
20576       </div>
20577       <div class="body">
20578         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
20579 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
20580 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
20581 contributor to the
20582 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20583 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
20584
20585 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20586
20587 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
20588 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
20589
20590 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20591 project?</strong></p>
20592
20593 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
20594 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
20595 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
20596 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
20597 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
20598 "localisation".</p>
20599
20600 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20601 Edu?</strong></p>
20602
20603 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20604 Edu?</strong></p>
20605
20606 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
20607 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
20608 education system.</p>
20609
20610 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
20611 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
20612 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
20613 money on the latest hardware.</p>
20614
20615 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20616
20617 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
20618 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
20619 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
20620
20621 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20622 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20623
20624 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
20625 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
20626 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
20627
20628       </div>
20629       <div class="tags">
20630
20631
20632         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20633
20634
20635       </div>
20636     </div>
20637     <div class="padding"></div>
20638
20639     <div class="entry">
20640       <div class="title">
20641         <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>
20642       </div>
20643       <div class="date">
20644          6th April 2012
20645       </div>
20646       <div class="body">
20647         <p>Recently I have spent time with
20648 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
20649 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20650 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
20651 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
20652 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
20653 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
20654 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
20655 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
20656
20657 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
20658 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
20659 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
20660 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
20661 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
20662 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
20663 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
20664 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
20665
20666 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
20667 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
20668 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
20669 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
20670 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
20671 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
20672 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
20673 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
20674
20675 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
20676 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
20677 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
20678 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
20679 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
20680 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
20681 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
20682 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
20683 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
20684 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
20685
20686 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
20687 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
20688 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
20689 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
20690
20691 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
20692 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
20693
20694 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
20695 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
20696 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
20697 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
20698
20699       </div>
20700       <div class="tags">
20701
20702
20703         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20704
20705
20706       </div>
20707     </div>
20708     <div class="padding"></div>
20709
20710     <div class="entry">
20711       <div class="title">
20712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
20713       </div>
20714       <div class="date">
20715          5th April 2012
20716       </div>
20717       <div class="body">
20718         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
20719 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
20720 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
20721 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
20722 for schools.  Check out his article
20723 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
20724 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
20725
20726       </div>
20727       <div class="tags">
20728
20729
20730         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20731
20732
20733       </div>
20734     </div>
20735     <div class="padding"></div>
20736
20737     <div class="entry">
20738       <div class="title">
20739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
20740       </div>
20741       <div class="date">
20742          1st April 2012
20743       </div>
20744       <div class="body">
20745         <p>Germany is a core area for the
20746 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20747 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
20748 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
20749
20750 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20751
20752 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
20753 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
20754 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
20755 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
20756 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
20757 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
20758 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
20759 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
20760
20761 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
20762 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
20763 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
20764 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
20765 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
20766 the end of April this year.</p>
20767
20768 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20769 project?</strong></p>
20770
20771 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
20772 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
20773 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
20774 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
20775 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
20776 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
20777 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
20778 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
20779 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
20780 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
20781 Skolelinux.</p>
20782
20783 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
20784 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
20785 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
20786 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
20787 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
20788 the admin teachers.</p>
20789
20790 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20791 Edu?</strong></p>
20792
20793 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
20794 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
20795 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
20796
20797 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
20798 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
20799 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
20800 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
20801 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
20802
20803 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20804 Edu?</strong></p>
20805
20806 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
20807
20808 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20809
20810 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
20811 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
20812 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
20813 LibreOffice.</p>
20814
20815 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20816 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20817
20818 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
20819 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
20820 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
20821
20822       </div>
20823       <div class="tags">
20824
20825
20826         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20827
20828
20829       </div>
20830     </div>
20831     <div class="padding"></div>
20832
20833     <div class="entry">
20834       <div class="title">
20835         <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>
20836       </div>
20837       <div class="date">
20838         25th March 2012
20839       </div>
20840       <div class="body">
20841         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
20842
20843 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
20844 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
20845 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
20846 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
20847 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
20848 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
20849 and download as a
20850 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
20851 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
20852
20853 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
20854   <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"' />
20855     <p>Download video as
20856       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
20857 </video></p>
20858
20859       </div>
20860       <div class="tags">
20861
20862
20863         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20864
20865
20866       </div>
20867     </div>
20868     <div class="padding"></div>
20869
20870     <div class="entry">
20871       <div class="title">
20872         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
20873       </div>
20874       <div class="date">
20875         19th March 2012
20876       </div>
20877       <div class="body">
20878         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20879 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
20880 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
20881 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
20882 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
20883
20884 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20885
20886 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
20887 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
20888 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
20889 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
20890 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
20891 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
20892 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
20893 installations.</p>
20894
20895 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20896 project?</strong></p>
20897
20898 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
20899 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
20900 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
20901 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
20902 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
20903 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
20904 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
20905 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
20906 these things we decided to try it.</p>
20907
20908 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20909 Edu?</strong></p>
20910
20911 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
20912 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
20913 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
20914 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
20915 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
20916 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
20917 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
20918 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
20919
20920 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20921 Edu?</strong></p>
20922
20923 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
20924 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
20925 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
20926 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
20927 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
20928
20929 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20930
20931 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
20932 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
20933 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
20934 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
20935 that counts...)</p>
20936
20937 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20938 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20939
20940 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
20941 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
20942 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
20943 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
20944 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
20945 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
20946 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
20947 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
20948 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
20949 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
20950 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
20951
20952 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
20953 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
20954 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
20955
20956       </div>
20957       <div class="tags">
20958
20959
20960         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20961
20962
20963       </div>
20964     </div>
20965     <div class="padding"></div>
20966
20967     <div class="entry">
20968       <div class="title">
20969         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
20970       </div>
20971       <div class="date">
20972         16th March 2012
20973       </div>
20974       <div class="body">
20975         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
20976 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
20977 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
20978 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
20979
20980 <ol>
20981
20982 <li>The documentation is written in a
20983 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
20984 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
20985 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
20986 docbook XML.</li>
20987
20988 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
20989 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
20990 with the translated text.</li>
20991
20992 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
20993 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
20994 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
20995 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
20996 images.</li>
20997
20998 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
20999 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
21000
21001 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
21002 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
21003
21004 </ol>
21005
21006 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
21007 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
21008 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
21009 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
21010 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
21011
21012 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
21013 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
21014 package</a>.</p>
21015
21016       </div>
21017       <div class="tags">
21018
21019
21020         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21021
21022
21023       </div>
21024     </div>
21025     <div class="padding"></div>
21026
21027     <div class="entry">
21028       <div class="title">
21029         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
21030       </div>
21031       <div class="date">
21032         11th March 2012
21033       </div>
21034       <div class="body">
21035         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
21036 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
21037 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21038 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
21039 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
21040 you have not done so already.</p>
21041
21042 <p>I plan to present the new version at
21043 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
21044 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
21045 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
21046
21047       </div>
21048       <div class="tags">
21049
21050
21051         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</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/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
21061       </div>
21062       <div class="date">
21063          9th March 2012
21064       </div>
21065       <div class="body">
21066         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
21067 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
21068 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
21069 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
21070 more international audience.</p>
21071
21072 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
21073 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
21074 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
21075 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
21076 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
21077 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
21078 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
21079
21080
21081 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21082
21083 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
21084 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
21085 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
21086 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
21087 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
21088 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
21089 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
21090 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
21091 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
21092 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
21093 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
21094
21095 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21096 project?</strong></p>
21097
21098 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
21099 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
21100 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
21101 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
21102 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
21103 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
21104 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
21105 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
21106 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
21107 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
21108 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
21109 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
21110 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
21111
21112 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21113 Edu?</strong></p>
21114
21115 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
21116 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
21117 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
21118 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
21119 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
21120 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
21121 Japan.</p>
21122
21123 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21124 Edu?</strong></p>
21125
21126 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
21127 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
21128 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
21129 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
21130 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
21131 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
21132 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
21133 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
21134 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
21135 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
21136 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
21137 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
21138 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
21139 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
21140 help.</p>
21141
21142 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21143
21144 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
21145 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
21146 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
21147 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
21148 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
21149 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
21150 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
21151 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
21152 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
21153 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
21154 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
21155
21156 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21157 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21158
21159 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
21160 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
21161 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
21162 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
21163 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
21164 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
21165 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
21166 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
21167 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
21168 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
21169 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
21170 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
21171
21172       </div>
21173       <div class="tags">
21174
21175
21176         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21177
21178
21179       </div>
21180     </div>
21181     <div class="padding"></div>
21182
21183     <div class="entry">
21184       <div class="title">
21185         <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>
21186       </div>
21187       <div class="date">
21188          7th March 2012
21189       </div>
21190       <div class="body">
21191         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
21192
21193 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
21194 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
21195 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
21196 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
21197 download as a
21198 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
21199 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
21200
21201 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
21202   <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"' />
21203     <p>Download video as
21204       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
21205 </video></p>
21206
21207       </div>
21208       <div class="tags">
21209
21210
21211         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21212
21213
21214       </div>
21215     </div>
21216     <div class="padding"></div>
21217
21218     <div class="entry">
21219       <div class="title">
21220         <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>
21221       </div>
21222       <div class="date">
21223          4th March 2012
21224       </div>
21225       <div class="body">
21226         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
21227 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21228 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21229 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
21230 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
21231 need a software solution for your school.</p>
21232
21233       </div>
21234       <div class="tags">
21235
21236
21237         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21238
21239
21240       </div>
21241     </div>
21242     <div class="padding"></div>
21243
21244     <div class="entry">
21245       <div class="title">
21246         <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>
21247       </div>
21248       <div class="date">
21249          3rd March 2012
21250       </div>
21251       <div class="body">
21252         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
21253 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
21254 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
21255 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
21256 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
21257 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
21258 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
21259 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
21260 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
21261 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
21262 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
21263 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
21264 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
21265 year...</p>
21266
21267 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
21268 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
21269 name,
21270 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
21271 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
21272 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
21273 mean). I've been following
21274 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
21275 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
21276 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
21277 Check it out. :)</p>
21278
21279       </div>
21280       <div class="tags">
21281
21282
21283         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21284
21285
21286       </div>
21287     </div>
21288     <div class="padding"></div>
21289
21290     <div class="entry">
21291       <div class="title">
21292         <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>
21293       </div>
21294       <div class="date">
21295         27th February 2012
21296       </div>
21297       <div class="body">
21298         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
21299 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21300 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
21301 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
21302 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
21303 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
21304 need a software solution for your school.</p>
21305
21306       </div>
21307       <div class="tags">
21308
21309
21310         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21311
21312
21313       </div>
21314     </div>
21315     <div class="padding"></div>
21316
21317     <div class="entry">
21318       <div class="title">
21319         <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>
21320       </div>
21321       <div class="date">
21322         19th February 2012
21323       </div>
21324       <div class="body">
21325         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
21326 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
21327 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21328 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21329 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
21330 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
21331 solution for your school.</p>
21332
21333       </div>
21334       <div class="tags">
21335
21336
21337         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21338
21339
21340       </div>
21341     </div>
21342     <div class="padding"></div>
21343
21344     <div class="entry">
21345       <div class="title">
21346         <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>
21347       </div>
21348       <div class="date">
21349         14th February 2012
21350       </div>
21351       <div class="body">
21352         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
21353 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
21354 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
21355 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
21356 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
21357 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
21358 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
21359 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
21360 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
21361
21362 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
21363 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
21364 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
21365 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
21366 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
21367
21368 <blockquote><pre>
21369 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
21370 do
21371     printf "Failed disk $d: "
21372     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
21373 done
21374 </blockquote></pre>
21375
21376 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
21377 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
21378
21379 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
21380
21381 <blockquote><pre>
21382 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
21383 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
21384 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
21385 </blockquote></pre>
21386
21387 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
21388 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
21389 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
21390 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
21391 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
21392 mounted inside my box.</p>
21393
21394 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
21395 Software RAID in the
21396 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
21397 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
21398 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
21399 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
21400 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
21401 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
21402
21403       </div>
21404       <div class="tags">
21405
21406
21407         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>.
21408
21409
21410       </div>
21411     </div>
21412     <div class="padding"></div>
21413
21414     <div class="entry">
21415       <div class="title">
21416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
21417       </div>
21418       <div class="date">
21419         13th February 2012
21420       </div>
21421       <div class="body">
21422         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
21423 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
21424 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
21425 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
21426 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
21427 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
21428 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
21429 change the global proxy setting by editing
21430 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
21431 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
21432
21433 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
21434 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
21435 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
21436
21437 <blockquote><pre>
21438 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
21439 {
21440    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
21441        isPlainHostName(host) ||
21442        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
21443       return "DIRECT";
21444    else
21445       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
21446 }
21447 </pre></blockquote>
21448
21449 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
21450
21451 <blockquote><pre>
21452 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21453 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21454 </pre></blockquote>
21455
21456 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
21457 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
21458 would be used for
21459 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
21460 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
21461 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
21462 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
21463 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
21464 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
21465 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
21466 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
21467 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
21468 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
21469
21470 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
21471 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
21472 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
21473 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
21474 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
21475 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
21476
21477 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
21478 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
21479 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
21480 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
21481 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
21482 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
21483 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
21484 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
21485 the network setup changes.</p>
21486
21487 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
21488 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
21489 draft</a> and a
21490 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
21491 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
21492
21493       </div>
21494       <div class="tags">
21495
21496
21497         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21498
21499
21500       </div>
21501     </div>
21502     <div class="padding"></div>
21503
21504     <div class="entry">
21505       <div class="title">
21506         <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>
21507       </div>
21508       <div class="date">
21509          5th February 2012
21510       </div>
21511       <div class="body">
21512         <p>Since the Lenny version of
21513 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
21514 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
21515 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
21516 in the morning.  This is done using the
21517 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
21518
21519 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
21520 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
21521 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
21522 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
21523 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
21524 the
21525 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
21526 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
21527 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
21528 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
21529 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
21530
21531 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
21532 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
21533 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
21534 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
21535 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
21536 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
21537 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
21538
21539 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
21540 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
21541 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
21542 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
21543 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
21544
21545       </div>
21546       <div class="tags">
21547
21548
21549         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21550
21551
21552       </div>
21553     </div>
21554     <div class="padding"></div>
21555
21556     <div class="entry">
21557       <div class="title">
21558         <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>
21559       </div>
21560       <div class="date">
21561          4th February 2012
21562       </div>
21563       <div class="body">
21564         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
21565 publish the third beta version of
21566 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21567 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
21568 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
21569 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
21570 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
21571 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
21572 on the project announcement list.</p>
21573
21574 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
21575 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
21576
21577 <ul>
21578
21579 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
21580   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
21581   the installation.</li>
21582
21583 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
21584   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
21585
21586 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
21587   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
21588   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
21589
21590 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
21591   for the local system administrator is created during installation
21592   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
21593   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
21594   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
21595   up to date on the system.</li>
21596
21597 </ul>
21598
21599 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
21600 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
21601 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
21602 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
21603
21604 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
21605 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
21606 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
21607 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
21608 will see you there?</p>
21609
21610       </div>
21611       <div class="tags">
21612
21613
21614         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21615
21616
21617       </div>
21618     </div>
21619     <div class="padding"></div>
21620
21621     <div class="entry">
21622       <div class="title">
21623         <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>
21624       </div>
21625       <div class="date">
21626         27th January 2012
21627       </div>
21628       <div class="body">
21629         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
21630 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
21631 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21632 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
21633 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
21634 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
21635 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
21636
21637 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
21638 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
21639 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
21640 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
21641 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
21642 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
21643 not taken care of by this.</p>
21644
21645 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
21646 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
21647 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
21648 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
21649 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
21650 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
21651 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
21652 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
21653 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
21654 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
21655 firmware packages.</p>
21656
21657 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
21658 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
21659 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
21660 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
21661 initrd with extra firmware, the
21662 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
21663 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
21664 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
21665
21666 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
21667 network cards working.  For this,
21668 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
21669 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
21670 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
21671
21672 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
21673 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
21674 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
21675
21676 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
21677 try.</p>
21678
21679       </div>
21680       <div class="tags">
21681
21682
21683         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21684
21685
21686       </div>
21687     </div>
21688     <div class="padding"></div>
21689
21690     <div class="entry">
21691       <div class="title">
21692         <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>
21693       </div>
21694       <div class="date">
21695         25th January 2012
21696       </div>
21697       <div class="body">
21698         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
21699 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
21700 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
21701 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
21702 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
21703
21704 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
21705 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
21706 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
21707 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
21708 this is done, log on to the central server and run
21709 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
21710 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
21711 will look similar to this:</p>
21712
21713 <p><blockquote><pre>
21714 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
21715 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
21716 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.
21717
21718 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
21719
21720 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21721 enter password: *******
21722 %
21723 </pre></blockquote></p>
21724
21725 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
21726 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
21727 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
21728 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
21729 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
21730 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
21731 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
21732 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
21733 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
21734 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
21735 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
21736 automatically.</p>
21737
21738 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
21739 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
21740
21741 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
21742 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
21743 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
21744
21745       </div>
21746       <div class="tags">
21747
21748
21749         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21750
21751
21752       </div>
21753     </div>
21754     <div class="padding"></div>
21755
21756     <div class="entry">
21757       <div class="title">
21758         <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>
21759       </div>
21760       <div class="date">
21761         10th January 2012
21762       </div>
21763       <div class="body">
21764         <p>In the Squeeze version of
21765 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
21766 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
21767 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
21768 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
21769 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
21770 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
21771 first time.</p>
21772
21773 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
21774 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
21775 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
21776 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
21777
21778 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
21779 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
21780 new setting.</p>
21781
21782 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
21783 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
21784 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
21785
21786       </div>
21787       <div class="tags">
21788
21789
21790         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21791
21792
21793       </div>
21794     </div>
21795     <div class="padding"></div>
21796
21797     <div class="entry">
21798       <div class="title">
21799         <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>
21800       </div>
21801       <div class="date">
21802          7th January 2012
21803       </div>
21804       <div class="body">
21805         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
21806 the second beta version of
21807 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
21808 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
21809 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
21810 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
21811 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
21812 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
21813 on the project announcement list.</p>
21814
21815       </div>
21816       <div class="tags">
21817
21818
21819         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21820
21821
21822       </div>
21823     </div>
21824     <div class="padding"></div>
21825
21826     <div class="entry">
21827       <div class="title">
21828         <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>
21829       </div>
21830       <div class="date">
21831          3rd January 2012
21832       </div>
21833       <div class="body">
21834         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
21835 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
21836 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
21837 interesting.</p>
21838
21839 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
21840 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
21841 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
21842 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
21843 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
21844 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
21845 wrap up its tasks.</p>
21846
21847 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
21848 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
21849 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
21850 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
21851 because I was typing.</P>
21852
21853 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
21854 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
21855 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
21856 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
21857 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
21858 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
21859 generate entropy.</p>
21860
21861 <p>The fix is in
21862 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
21863 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
21864 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
21865 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
21866
21867       </div>
21868       <div class="tags">
21869
21870
21871         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21872
21873
21874       </div>
21875     </div>
21876     <div class="padding"></div>
21877
21878     <div class="entry">
21879       <div class="title">
21880         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
21881       </div>
21882       <div class="date">
21883         21st November 2011
21884       </div>
21885       <div class="body">
21886         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
21887 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
21888 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
21889 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
21890 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
21891 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
21892 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
21893 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
21894 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
21895 the tools to do so.</p>
21896
21897 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
21898 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
21899 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
21900 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
21901
21902 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
21903 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
21904 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
21905 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
21906 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
21907 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
21908 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
21909 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
21910
21911 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
21912 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
21913 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
21914
21915 <p><pre>
21916 #!/usr/bin/perl
21917 use strict;
21918 use warnings;
21919 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
21920 BEGIN {
21921     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
21922     my %rhelmodules = (
21923         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
21924         );
21925     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
21926         eval "use $module;";
21927         if ($@) {
21928             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
21929             system("yum install -y $pkg");
21930             eval "use $module;";
21931         }
21932     }
21933 }
21934 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
21935
21936 upgrade_dell();
21937
21938 exit 0;
21939
21940 sub run_firmware_script {
21941     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
21942     unless ($script) {
21943         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
21944         exit 1
21945     }
21946     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
21947
21948     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
21949         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
21950     } else {
21951         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
21952     }
21953 }
21954
21955 sub run_firmware_scripts {
21956     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
21957     # Run firmware packages
21958     for my $dir (@dirs) {
21959         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
21960         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
21961         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
21962             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
21963             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
21964         }
21965         closedir $dh;
21966     }
21967 }
21968
21969 sub download {
21970     my $url = shift;
21971     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
21972     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
21973 }
21974
21975 sub upgrade_dell {
21976     my @dirs;
21977     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21978     chomp $product;
21979
21980     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
21981
21982         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
21983         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
21984
21985         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
21986             CLEANUP => 1
21987             );
21988         chdir($tmpdir);
21989         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
21990         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
21991         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
21992         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
21993         my $fwopts = "-q";
21994         if (@paths) {
21995             for my $url (@paths) {
21996                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
21997             }
21998             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
21999         } else {
22000             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
22001             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
22002         }
22003         chdir('/');
22004     } else {
22005         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
22006         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
22007     }
22008 }
22009
22010 sub fetch_dell_fw {
22011     my $path = shift;
22012     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
22013     download($url);
22014 }
22015
22016 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
22017 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
22018 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
22019 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
22020     my $filename = shift;
22021
22022     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
22023     chomp $product;
22024     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
22025
22026     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
22027
22028     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
22029     my @paths;
22030     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
22031         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
22032         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
22033         my $oscode;
22034         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
22035             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
22036         } else {
22037             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
22038         }
22039         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
22040         {
22041             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
22042         }
22043     }
22044     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
22045         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
22046
22047         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
22048         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
22049
22050         my $cpath = $component->{path};
22051         for my $path (@paths) {
22052             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
22053                 push(@paths, $cpath);
22054             }
22055         }
22056     }
22057     return @paths;
22058 }
22059 </pre>
22060
22061 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
22062 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
22063 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
22064 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
22065 outdated.</p>
22066
22067       </div>
22068       <div class="tags">
22069
22070
22071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22072
22073
22074       </div>
22075     </div>
22076     <div class="padding"></div>
22077
22078     <div class="entry">
22079       <div class="title">
22080         <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>
22081       </div>
22082       <div class="date">
22083          7th October 2011
22084       </div>
22085       <div class="body">
22086         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
22087 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
22088 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
22089 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
22090 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
22091 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
22092 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
22093 models.</p>
22094
22095 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
22096 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
22097 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
22098 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
22099
22100 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
22101 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
22102 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
22103 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
22104 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
22105 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
22106 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
22107 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
22108 distributed.</p>
22109
22110 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
22111
22112 <ul>
22113
22114 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
22115   other relevant equipment.</li>
22116
22117 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
22118
22119 </ul>
22120
22121 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
22122 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
22123 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
22124 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
22125 books available.</p>
22126
22127 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
22128 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
22129 libraries. :)</p>
22130
22131       </div>
22132       <div class="tags">
22133
22134
22135         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>.
22136
22137
22138       </div>
22139     </div>
22140     <div class="padding"></div>
22141
22142     <div class="entry">
22143       <div class="title">
22144         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
22145       </div>
22146       <div class="date">
22147         17th September 2011
22148       </div>
22149       <div class="body">
22150         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
22151 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
22152 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
22153 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
22154 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
22155 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
22156 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
22157 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
22158
22159 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
22160
22161 <blockquote><pre>
22162 #!/bin/sh
22163 # apt-get install lsdvd
22164 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
22165 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
22166 </pre></blockquote>
22167
22168 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
22169 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
22170 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
22171 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
22172
22173 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
22174 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
22175 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
22176 back as an ISO.
22177
22178 <blockquote><pre>
22179 #!/bin/sh
22180 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
22181 set -e
22182 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
22183 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
22184 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
22185 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
22186 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
22187 </pre></blockquote>
22188
22189 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
22190
22191 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
22192 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
22193 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
22194 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
22195 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
22196
22197 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
22198 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
22199 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
22200 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
22201 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
22202 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
22203
22204       </div>
22205       <div class="tags">
22206
22207
22208         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>.
22209
22210
22211       </div>
22212     </div>
22213     <div class="padding"></div>
22214
22215     <div class="entry">
22216       <div class="title">
22217         <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>
22218       </div>
22219       <div class="date">
22220          4th August 2011
22221       </div>
22222       <div class="body">
22223         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
22224 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
22225 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
22226 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
22227 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
22228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
22229 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
22230 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
22231 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
22232
22233 <p><blockquote>
22234 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
22235 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
22236 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
22237 </blockquote></p>
22238
22239 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
22240 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
22241 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
22242 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
22243 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
22244 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
22245 hard to explain.</p>
22246
22247 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
22248 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
22249 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
22250 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
22251 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
22252 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
22253 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
22254 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
22255 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
22256 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
22257 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
22258 mode).</p>
22259
22260 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
22261 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
22262 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
22263 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
22264 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
22265 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
22266 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
22267 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
22268 after visiting single user mode.</p>
22269
22270 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
22271 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
22272 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
22273 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
22274 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
22275 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
22276 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
22277 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
22278
22279 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
22280 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
22281 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
22282
22283       </div>
22284       <div class="tags">
22285
22286
22287         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>.
22288
22289
22290       </div>
22291     </div>
22292     <div class="padding"></div>
22293
22294     <div class="entry">
22295       <div class="title">
22296         <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>
22297       </div>
22298       <div class="date">
22299         30th July 2011
22300       </div>
22301       <div class="body">
22302         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
22303 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
22304 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
22305 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
22306 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
22307 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
22308 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
22309 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
22310 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
22311 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
22312 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
22313 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
22314 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
22315
22316 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
22317 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
22318 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
22319 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
22320 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
22321 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
22322 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
22323 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
22324 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
22325
22326 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
22327 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
22328 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
22329 is presented.</p>
22330
22331 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
22332 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
22333 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
22334 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
22335 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
22336 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
22337 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
22338 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
22339 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
22340 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
22341 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
22342 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
22343 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
22344 find time to push this forward.</p>
22345
22346       </div>
22347       <div class="tags">
22348
22349
22350         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>.
22351
22352
22353       </div>
22354     </div>
22355     <div class="padding"></div>
22356
22357     <div class="entry">
22358       <div class="title">
22359         <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>
22360       </div>
22361       <div class="date">
22362         29th July 2011
22363       </div>
22364       <div class="body">
22365         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
22366 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
22367 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
22368 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
22369 issues.</p>
22370
22371 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
22372 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
22373 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
22374
22375 <ol>
22376
22377 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
22378 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
22379 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
22380 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
22381 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
22382 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
22383 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
22384 Debian.</li>
22385
22386 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
22387 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
22388 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
22389 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
22390 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
22391 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
22392 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
22393 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
22394 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
22395 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
22396 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
22397 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
22398 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
22399
22400 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
22401 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
22402 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
22403 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
22404 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
22405 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
22406 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
22407 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
22408 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
22409 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
22410
22411 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
22412 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
22413 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
22414 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
22415 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
22416 latter behaviour.</li>
22417
22418 </ol>
22419
22420 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
22421 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
22422 it do not matter much.</p>
22423
22424 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
22425 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
22426 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
22427
22428       </div>
22429       <div class="tags">
22430
22431
22432         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
22433
22434
22435       </div>
22436     </div>
22437     <div class="padding"></div>
22438
22439     <div class="entry">
22440       <div class="title">
22441         <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>
22442       </div>
22443       <div class="date">
22444         26th July 2011
22445       </div>
22446       <div class="body">
22447         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
22448 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
22449 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
22450 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
22451 security support for a few years.</p>
22452
22453 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
22454 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
22455 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
22456 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
22457 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
22458 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
22459 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
22460 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
22461 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
22462 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
22463 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
22464 easier in the future.</p>
22465
22466 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
22467 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
22468 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
22469 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
22470 do not have time for.</p>
22471
22472       </div>
22473       <div class="tags">
22474
22475
22476         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
22477
22478
22479       </div>
22480     </div>
22481     <div class="padding"></div>
22482
22483     <div class="entry">
22484       <div class="title">
22485         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
22486       </div>
22487       <div class="date">
22488         20th June 2011
22489       </div>
22490       <div class="body">
22491         <p>Reading
22492 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
22493 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
22494 parts of the
22495 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
22496 and
22497 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
22498 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
22499 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
22500 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
22501
22502       </div>
22503       <div class="tags">
22504
22505
22506         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>.
22507
22508
22509       </div>
22510     </div>
22511     <div class="padding"></div>
22512
22513     <div class="entry">
22514       <div class="title">
22515         <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>
22516       </div>
22517       <div class="date">
22518         30th April 2011
22519       </div>
22520       <div class="body">
22521         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
22522 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
22523 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
22524 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
22525 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
22526 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
22527 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
22528 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
22529 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
22530 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
22531
22532 <p>Where is it?  Visit
22533 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
22534 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
22535 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
22536 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
22537
22538       </div>
22539       <div class="tags">
22540
22541
22542         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>.
22543
22544
22545       </div>
22546     </div>
22547     <div class="padding"></div>
22548
22549     <div class="entry">
22550       <div class="title">
22551         <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>
22552       </div>
22553       <div class="date">
22554         29th April 2011
22555       </div>
22556       <div class="body">
22557         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
22558 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
22559 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
22560 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
22561 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
22562 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
22563 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
22564 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
22565 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
22566 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
22567 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
22568 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
22569 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
22570
22571 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
22572 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
22573 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
22574 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
22575 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
22576 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
22577 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
22578 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
22579 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
22580 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
22581 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
22582 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
22583 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
22584
22585 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
22586 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
22587 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
22588 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
22589 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
22590 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
22591 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
22592 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
22593 it.</p>
22594
22595 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
22596 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
22597 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
22598 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
22599 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
22600 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
22601 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
22602
22603 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
22604 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
22605 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
22606 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
22607 and range= options.</p>
22608
22609 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
22610 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
22611 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
22612 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
22613 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
22614 to best handle this.  I've noticed
22615 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
22616 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
22617 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
22618 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
22619
22620 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
22621 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
22622 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
22623 discussions instead of only
22624 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
22625 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
22626 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
22627 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
22628 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
22629 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
22630
22631       </div>
22632       <div class="tags">
22633
22634
22635         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>.
22636
22637
22638       </div>
22639     </div>
22640     <div class="padding"></div>
22641
22642     <div class="entry">
22643       <div class="title">
22644         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
22645       </div>
22646       <div class="date">
22647          6th April 2011
22648       </div>
22649       <div class="body">
22650         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
22651 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
22652 A few days ago the project
22653 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
22654 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
22655 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
22656 into Gnash.</p>
22657
22658       </div>
22659       <div class="tags">
22660
22661
22662         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>.
22663
22664
22665       </div>
22666     </div>
22667     <div class="padding"></div>
22668
22669     <div class="entry">
22670       <div class="title">
22671         <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>
22672       </div>
22673       <div class="date">
22674          3rd April 2011
22675       </div>
22676       <div class="body">
22677         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
22678 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
22679 update in English.</p>
22680
22681 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
22682 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
22683 of the British service
22684 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
22685 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
22686 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
22687 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
22688 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
22689 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
22690 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
22691 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
22692 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
22693 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
22694 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
22695 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
22696 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
22697
22698 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
22699 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
22700 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
22701 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
22702 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
22703 public infrastructure.</p>
22704
22705 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
22706 such service?</p>
22707
22708       </div>
22709       <div class="tags">
22710
22711
22712         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
22713
22714
22715       </div>
22716     </div>
22717     <div class="padding"></div>
22718
22719     <div class="entry">
22720       <div class="title">
22721         <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>
22722       </div>
22723       <div class="date">
22724         28th January 2011
22725       </div>
22726       <div class="body">
22727         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
22728 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
22729 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
22730 available on the Internet, and check our locally
22731 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
22732 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
22733 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
22734 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
22735 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
22736 out which security holes were present in our free software
22737 collection.</p>
22738
22739 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
22740 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
22741 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
22742 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
22743 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
22744 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
22745 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
22746 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
22747 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
22748 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
22749 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
22750 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
22751 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
22752 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
22753 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
22754 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
22755
22756 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
22757 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
22758 check out, one could look up
22759 <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
22760 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
22761 The most recent one is
22762 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
22763 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
22764 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
22765
22766 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
22767 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
22768 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
22769 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
22770 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
22771 security issues out.</p>
22772
22773 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
22774 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
22775 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
22776 RHEL is providing
22777 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
22778 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
22779 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
22780
22781 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
22782 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
22783 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
22784 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
22785 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
22786 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
22787 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
22788 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
22789 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
22790 established soon.</p>
22791
22792 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
22793 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
22794 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
22795 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
22796 for their packages.</p>
22797
22798       </div>
22799       <div class="tags">
22800
22801
22802         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
22803
22804
22805       </div>
22806     </div>
22807     <div class="padding"></div>
22808
22809     <div class="entry">
22810       <div class="title">
22811         <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>
22812       </div>
22813       <div class="date">
22814         23rd January 2011
22815       </div>
22816       <div class="body">
22817         <p>In the
22818 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
22819 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
22820 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
22821 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
22822 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
22823 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
22824 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
22825 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
22826 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
22827 one of my machines like this:</p>
22828
22829 <pre>
22830 loaded modules:
22831 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
22832 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
22833 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
22834 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
22835 10de:03ec pata_amd
22836 10de:03f6 sata_nv
22837 1022:1103 k8temp
22838 109e:036e bttv
22839 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
22840 11ab:4364 sky2
22841 </pre>
22842
22843 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
22844 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
22845
22846 <pre>
22847 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
22848     echo loaded pci modules:
22849     (
22850         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
22851         for address in * ; do
22852             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
22853                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22854                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
22855                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
22856                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
22857                     echo "$id $module"
22858                 fi
22859             fi
22860         done
22861     )
22862     echo
22863 fi
22864 </pre>
22865
22866 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
22867 mappings:</p>
22868
22869 <pre>
22870 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
22871     echo loaded usb modules:
22872     (
22873         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
22874         for address in * ; do
22875             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
22876                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22877                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
22878                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
22879                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
22880                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
22881                         echo "$id $module"
22882                     fi
22883                 fi
22884             fi
22885         done
22886     )
22887     echo
22888 fi
22889 </pre>
22890
22891 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
22892 well.</p>
22893
22894       </div>
22895       <div class="tags">
22896
22897
22898         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22899
22900
22901       </div>
22902     </div>
22903     <div class="padding"></div>
22904
22905     <div class="entry">
22906       <div class="title">
22907         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html">The video format most supported in web browsers?</a>
22908       </div>
22909       <div class="date">
22910         16th January 2011
22911       </div>
22912       <div class="body">
22913         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
22914 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
22915 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
22916 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
22917 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
22918 the Wikipedia article on
22919 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
22920 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
22921 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
22922 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
22923 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
22924 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
22925 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
22926 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
22927 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
22928 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
22929 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
22930 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
22931
22932 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
22933 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
22934 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
22935 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
22936 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
22937 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
22938 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
22939 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
22940 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
22941 from last week</a>.</p>
22942
22943 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
22944 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
22945 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
22946 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
22947 was without royalties and license terms, check out
22948 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
22949 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
22950
22951 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
22952 available from
22953 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
22954 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
22955 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
22956
22957 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
22958 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
22959 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
22960 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
22961
22962       </div>
22963       <div class="tags">
22964
22965
22966         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
22967
22968
22969       </div>
22970     </div>
22971     <div class="padding"></div>
22972
22973     <div class="entry">
22974       <div class="title">
22975         <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>
22976       </div>
22977       <div class="date">
22978         12th January 2011
22979       </div>
22980       <div class="body">
22981         <p>Today I discovered
22982 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
22983 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
22984 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
22985 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
22986 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
22987 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
22988 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
22989 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
22990 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
22991 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
22992 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
22993 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
22994 on the Google announcement is available from
22995 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
22996 A good read. :)</p>
22997
22998 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
22999 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
23000 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
23001 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
23002 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
23003 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
23004 browsers support H.264, and others support
23005 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
23006 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
23007 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
23008 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
23009 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
23010 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
23011 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
23012 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
23013
23014 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
23015 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
23016 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
23017 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
23018 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
23019 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
23020 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
23021
23022 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
23023 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
23024 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
23025 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
23026 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
23027 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
23028 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
23029
23030 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
23031 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
23032 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
23033 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
23034 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
23035 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
23036 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
23037
23038 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
23039 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
23040 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
23041 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
23042 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
23043 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
23044 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
23045 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
23046 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
23047 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
23048 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
23049 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
23050 I guess time will tell.</p>
23051
23052 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
23053 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
23054 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
23055
23056       </div>
23057       <div class="tags">
23058
23059
23060         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23061
23062
23063       </div>
23064     </div>
23065     <div class="padding"></div>
23066
23067     <div class="entry">
23068       <div class="title">
23069         <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>
23070       </div>
23071       <div class="date">
23072         30th December 2010
23073       </div>
23074       <div class="body">
23075         <p>After trying to
23076 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
23077 Ogg Theora</a> to
23078 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
23079 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
23080 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
23081 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
23082 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
23083 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
23084 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
23085
23086 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
23087 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
23088 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
23089 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
23090 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
23091 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
23092 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
23093
23094 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
23095 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
23096
23097       </div>
23098       <div class="tags">
23099
23100
23101         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>.
23102
23103
23104       </div>
23105     </div>
23106     <div class="padding"></div>
23107
23108     <div class="entry">
23109       <div class="title">
23110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
23111       </div>
23112       <div class="date">
23113         27th December 2010
23114       </div>
23115       <div class="body">
23116         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
23117 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
23118 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
23119 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
23120 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
23121 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
23122 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
23123 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
23124
23125 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
23126 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
23127 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
23128 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
23129 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
23130 page</a>.</p>
23131
23132 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
23133 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
23134 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
23135 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
23136 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
23137 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
23138 specification on equal terms.</p>
23139
23140 <blockquote>
23141
23142 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
23143 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
23144 open standard:</p>
23145
23146 <ul>
23147
23148 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
23149 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
23150 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
23151 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
23152
23153 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
23154 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
23155 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
23156 nominal fee.</li>
23157
23158 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
23159 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
23160 free basis.</li>
23161
23162 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
23163
23164 </ul>
23165 </blockquote>
23166
23167 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
23168 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
23169 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
23170 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
23171 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
23172 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
23173 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
23174
23175 <blockquote>
23176
23177 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
23178
23179 <ol>
23180
23181 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
23182 tilgængelig.</li>
23183
23184 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
23185 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
23186
23187 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
23188 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
23189
23190 </ol>
23191
23192 </blockquote>
23193
23194 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
23195 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
23196
23197 <blockquote>
23198
23199 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
23200
23201 <ol>
23202
23203 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
23204 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
23205
23206 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
23207 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
23208 Standard themselves;</li>
23209
23210 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
23211 any party or in any business model;</li>
23212
23213 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
23214 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
23215 parties;</li>
23216
23217 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
23218 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
23219 parties.</li>
23220
23221 </ol>
23222
23223 </blockquote>
23224
23225 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
23226 its
23227 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
23228 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
23229
23230 <blockquote>
23231 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
23232
23233 <ul>
23234
23235 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
23236   democratic:
23237
23238          <ul>
23239
23240          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
23241             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
23242             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
23243             and managed.</li>
23244
23245          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
23246             method, can be changed through input from all
23247             participants.</li>
23248
23249          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
23250             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
23251
23252          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
23253             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
23254
23255          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
23256             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
23257             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
23258
23259          </ul>
23260
23261 </li>
23262
23263 </ul>
23264
23265 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
23266 <ul>
23267
23268 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
23269   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
23270   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
23271   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
23272   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
23273
23274 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
23275   a technical or economic barriers</li>
23276
23277 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
23278   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
23279   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
23280   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
23281   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
23282   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
23283   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
23284   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
23285   intended to function.</li>
23286
23287 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
23288   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
23289   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
23290
23291 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
23292   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
23293   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
23294   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
23295   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
23296   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
23297   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
23298   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
23299
23300       <ul>
23301
23302       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
23303         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
23304         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
23305
23306       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
23307         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
23308         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
23309         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
23310
23311       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
23312         licensor</li>
23313
23314       </ul>
23315 </li>
23316
23317 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
23318   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
23319   or restricted licensing terms</li>
23320
23321 </ul>
23322
23323 </blockquote>
23324
23325 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
23326 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
23327 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
23328 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
23329 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
23330 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
23331 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
23332 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
23333 Standards.</p>
23334
23335       </div>
23336       <div class="tags">
23337
23338
23339         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>.
23340
23341
23342       </div>
23343     </div>
23344     <div class="padding"></div>
23345
23346     <div class="entry">
23347       <div class="title">
23348         <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>
23349       </div>
23350       <div class="date">
23351         25th December 2010
23352       </div>
23353       <div class="body">
23354         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
23355 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
23356
23357 <blockquote>
23358
23359 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
23360 as follows:</p>
23361
23362 <ol>
23363
23364 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
23365 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
23366 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
23367
23368 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
23369 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
23370 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
23371 parties.</li>
23372
23373 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
23374 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
23375 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
23376
23377 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
23378 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
23379
23380 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
23381
23382 </ol>
23383
23384 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
23385 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
23386 products based on the standard.</p>
23387 </blockquote>
23388
23389 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
23390 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
23391 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
23392 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
23393 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
23394 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
23395 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
23396 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
23397
23398 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
23399
23400 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
23401 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
23402 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
23403 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
23404 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
23405 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
23406 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
23407 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
23408 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
23409 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
23410 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
23411 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
23412 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
23413 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
23414
23415 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
23416
23417 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
23418 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
23419 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
23420 documentation indicating this.</p>
23421
23422 <p>According to
23423 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
23424 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
23425 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
23426 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
23427 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
23428 report is correct.</p>
23429
23430 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
23431
23432 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
23433 container format</a> and both the
23434 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
23435 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
23436 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
23437
23438 <blockquote>
23439
23440 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
23441 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
23442 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
23443 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
23444 specification compliance.
23445
23446 </blockquote>
23447
23448 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
23449 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
23450 this is the term:<p>
23451
23452 <blockquote>
23453
23454 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
23455 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
23456 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
23457 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
23458 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
23459 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
23460 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
23461 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
23462 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
23463 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
23464 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
23465 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
23466
23467 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
23468 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
23469 </blockquote>
23470
23471 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
23472 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
23473 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
23474 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
23475 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
23476
23477 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
23478
23479 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
23480 Theora format.
23481 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
23482 and
23483 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
23484 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
23485 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
23486 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
23487 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
23488 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
23489 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
23490 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
23491
23492 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
23493
23494 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
23495
23496 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
23497
23498 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
23499 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
23500 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
23501 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
23502 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
23503 this.</p>
23504
23505 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
23506 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
23507
23508       </div>
23509       <div class="tags">
23510
23511
23512         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23513
23514
23515       </div>
23516     </div>
23517     <div class="padding"></div>
23518
23519     <div class="entry">
23520       <div class="title">
23521         <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>
23522       </div>
23523       <div class="date">
23524         25th December 2010
23525       </div>
23526       <div class="body">
23527         <p>A few days ago
23528 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
23529 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
23530 2.0 of
23531 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
23532 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
23533 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
23534 Nothing very surprising there, given
23535 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
23536 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
23537 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
23538 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
23539 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
23540 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
23541 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
23542 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
23543 standard definition from its content.</p>
23544
23545 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
23546 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
23547 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
23548 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
23549 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
23550 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
23551 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
23552 background information about that story is available in
23553 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
23554 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
23555
23556 <blockquote>
23557 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
23558 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
23559 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
23560
23561 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
23562
23563 <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>
23564
23565 <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>
23566
23567 <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>
23568
23569 <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>
23570
23571 <p>
23572 <ul>
23573 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
23574 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
23575 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
23576 </ul>
23577 </p>
23578
23579 <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>
23580
23581 <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>
23582
23583 <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>
23584
23585 <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>
23586
23587 <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>
23588
23589
23590 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
23591 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
23592 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
23593 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
23594 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
23595 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
23596
23597 </p>
23598
23599 <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>
23600
23601 <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>
23602
23603 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
23604
23605 <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>
23606
23607 <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>
23608
23609 <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>
23610
23611 <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>
23612
23613 <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>
23614
23615 <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>
23616
23617 <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>
23618
23619 <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>
23620
23621 <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>
23622
23623 <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>
23624
23625 <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>
23626
23627 <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>
23628
23629 <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>
23630
23631 <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>
23632
23633 <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>
23634
23635 <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>
23636
23637 <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>
23638
23639 <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>
23640
23641 <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>
23642
23643 <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>
23644
23645 <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>
23646
23647 <p>On security:</p>
23648
23649 <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>
23650
23651 <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>
23652
23653 <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>
23654
23655 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
23656
23657 <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>
23658
23659 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
23660
23661 <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>
23662
23663 <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>
23664
23665 <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>
23666
23667 <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>
23668
23669 <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>
23670
23671 <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>
23672
23673 <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>
23674
23675 <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>
23676
23677 <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>
23678
23679 <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>
23680
23681 <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>
23682
23683 <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>
23684
23685 <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>
23686
23687 <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>
23688
23689 <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>
23690
23691 <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>
23692
23693 <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>
23694
23695 <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>
23696
23697 <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>
23698
23699 <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>
23700
23701 <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>
23702
23703 <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>
23704
23705 <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>
23706
23707 <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>
23708
23709 <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>
23710
23711 <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>
23712
23713 <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>
23714
23715 <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>
23716
23717 <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>
23718
23719 <p>Cordially,<br>
23720 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
23721 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
23722 </blockquote>
23723
23724       </div>
23725       <div class="tags">
23726
23727
23728         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>.
23729
23730
23731       </div>
23732     </div>
23733     <div class="padding"></div>
23734
23735     <div class="entry">
23736       <div class="title">
23737         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
23738       </div>
23739       <div class="date">
23740         25th December 2010
23741       </div>
23742       <div class="body">
23743         <p>Half a year ago I
23744 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
23745 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
23746 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
23747 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
23748
23749 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
23750 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
23751 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
23752 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
23753 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
23754 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
23755 got such a great test tool available.</p>
23756
23757       </div>
23758       <div class="tags">
23759
23760
23761         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>.
23762
23763
23764       </div>
23765     </div>
23766     <div class="padding"></div>
23767
23768     <div class="entry">
23769       <div class="title">
23770         <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>
23771       </div>
23772       <div class="date">
23773         22nd December 2010
23774       </div>
23775       <div class="body">
23776         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
23777 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
23778 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
23779 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
23780 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
23781 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
23782 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
23783 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
23784 university.</p>
23785
23786 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
23787 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
23788 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
23789 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
23790 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
23791 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
23792 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
23793 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
23794
23795 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
23796 I perform on a new model.</p>
23797
23798 <ul>
23799
23800 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
23801 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
23802 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
23803
23804 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
23805 installation, X.org is working.</li>
23806
23807 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
23808 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
23809 reported by the program.</li>
23810
23811 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
23812 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
23813 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
23814 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
23815 normally test this by playing
23816 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
23817 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
23818
23819 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
23820 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
23821
23822 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
23823 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
23824
23825 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
23826 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
23827
23828 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
23829 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
23830 few.</li>
23831
23832 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
23833 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
23834 notice this.</li>
23835
23836 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
23837 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
23838 resume.</li>
23839
23840 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
23841 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
23842 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
23843 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
23844 not.</li>
23845
23846 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
23847 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
23848 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
23849 existence.</li>
23850
23851 </ul>
23852
23853 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
23854 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
23855 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
23856 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
23857 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
23858 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
23859 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
23860 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
23861
23862       </div>
23863       <div class="tags">
23864
23865
23866         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>.
23867
23868
23869       </div>
23870     </div>
23871     <div class="padding"></div>
23872
23873     <div class="entry">
23874       <div class="title">
23875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
23876       </div>
23877       <div class="date">
23878         11th December 2010
23879       </div>
23880       <div class="body">
23881         <p>As I continue to explore
23882 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
23883 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
23884 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
23885
23886 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
23887 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
23888 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
23889 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
23890 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
23891 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
23892 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
23893 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
23894 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
23895 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
23896 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
23897 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
23898 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
23899 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
23900 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
23901 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
23902 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
23903 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
23904 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
23905 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
23906
23907 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
23908 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
23909 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
23910 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
23911 If the Skolelinux foundation
23912 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
23913 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
23914 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
23915 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
23916 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
23917 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
23918 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
23919 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
23920
23921 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
23922 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
23923 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
23924 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
23925 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
23926 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
23927 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
23928 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
23929 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
23930 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
23931 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
23932 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
23933 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
23934 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
23935 currencies.</p>
23936
23937 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
23938 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
23939 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
23940 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
23941 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
23942 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
23943 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
23944 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
23945 BitCoins.  Check out
23946 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
23947 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
23948 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
23949 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
23950 yet.</p>
23951
23952 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
23953 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
23954 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
23955 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
23956 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
23957
23958       </div>
23959       <div class="tags">
23960
23961
23962         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>.
23963
23964
23965       </div>
23966     </div>
23967     <div class="padding"></div>
23968
23969     <div class="entry">
23970       <div class="title">
23971         <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>
23972       </div>
23973       <div class="date">
23974         10th December 2010
23975       </div>
23976       <div class="body">
23977         <p>With this weeks lawless
23978 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
23979 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
23980 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
23981 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
23982 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
23983 A blog post from
23984 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
23985 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
23986 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
23987 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
23988 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
23989 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
23990 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
23991
23992 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
23993 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
23994 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
23995 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
23996 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
23997 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
23998 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
23999 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
24000 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
24001 Debian</a> soon.</p>
24002
24003 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
24004 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
24005 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
24006 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
24007 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
24008 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
24009 you can even get
24010 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
24011 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
24012 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
24013 on the current exchange rates.</p>
24014
24015 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
24016 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
24017 donations to the address
24018 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
24019
24020       </div>
24021       <div class="tags">
24022
24023
24024         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>.
24025
24026
24027       </div>
24028     </div>
24029     <div class="padding"></div>
24030
24031     <div class="entry">
24032       <div class="title">
24033         <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>
24034       </div>
24035       <div class="date">
24036          9th December 2010
24037       </div>
24038       <div class="body">
24039         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
24040 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
24041 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
24042 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
24043 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
24044 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
24045 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
24046 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
24047 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
24048 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
24049 operational.</p>
24050
24051 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
24052 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
24053 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
24054 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
24055 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
24056 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
24057 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
24058
24059       </div>
24060       <div class="tags">
24061
24062
24063         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>.
24064
24065
24066       </div>
24067     </div>
24068     <div class="padding"></div>
24069
24070     <div class="entry">
24071       <div class="title">
24072         <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>
24073       </div>
24074       <div class="date">
24075         29th November 2010
24076       </div>
24077       <div class="body">
24078         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
24079 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
24080 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
24081 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
24082 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
24083 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
24084
24085 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
24086 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
24087 will hold its
24088 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
24089 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
24090 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
24091 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
24092 vote this year.</p>
24093
24094       </div>
24095       <div class="tags">
24096
24097
24098         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24099
24100
24101       </div>
24102     </div>
24103     <div class="padding"></div>
24104
24105     <div class="entry">
24106       <div class="title">
24107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
24108       </div>
24109       <div class="date">
24110         27th November 2010
24111       </div>
24112       <div class="body">
24113         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
24114 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
24115 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
24116 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
24117 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
24118 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
24119 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
24120 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
24121
24122 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
24123 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
24124 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
24125 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
24126 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
24127 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
24128 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
24129 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
24130 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
24131 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
24132 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
24133
24134 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
24135 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
24136 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
24137 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
24138 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
24139 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
24140 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
24141 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
24142 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
24143 what is going on.</p>
24144
24145       </div>
24146       <div class="tags">
24147
24148
24149         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>.
24150
24151
24152       </div>
24153     </div>
24154     <div class="padding"></div>
24155
24156     <div class="entry">
24157       <div class="title">
24158         <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>
24159       </div>
24160       <div class="date">
24161         22nd November 2010
24162       </div>
24163       <div class="body">
24164         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
24165 upgrade testing of the
24166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
24167 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
24168 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
24169 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
24170
24171 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
24172
24173 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24174
24175 <blockquote><p>
24176   apache2.2-bin
24177   aptdaemon
24178   baobab
24179   binfmt-support
24180   browser-plugin-gnash
24181   cheese-common
24182   cli-common
24183   cups-pk-helper
24184   dmz-cursor-theme
24185   empathy
24186   empathy-common
24187   freedesktop-sound-theme
24188   freeglut3
24189   gconf-defaults-service
24190   gdm-themes
24191   gedit-plugins
24192   geoclue
24193   geoclue-hostip
24194   geoclue-localnet
24195   geoclue-manual
24196   geoclue-yahoo
24197   gnash
24198   gnash-common
24199   gnome
24200   gnome-backgrounds
24201   gnome-cards-data
24202   gnome-codec-install
24203   gnome-core
24204   gnome-desktop-environment
24205   gnome-disk-utility
24206   gnome-screenshot
24207   gnome-search-tool
24208   gnome-session-canberra
24209   gnome-system-log
24210   gnome-themes-extras
24211   gnome-themes-more
24212   gnome-user-share
24213   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
24214   gstreamer0.10-tools
24215   gtk2-engines
24216   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
24217   gtk2-engines-smooth
24218   hamster-applet
24219   libapache2-mod-dnssd
24220   libapr1
24221   libaprutil1
24222   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
24223   libaprutil1-ldap
24224   libart2.0-cil
24225   libboost-date-time1.42.0
24226   libboost-python1.42.0
24227   libboost-thread1.42.0
24228   libchamplain-0.4-0
24229   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
24230   libcheese-gtk18
24231   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
24232   libcryptui0
24233   libdiscid0
24234   libelf1
24235   libepc-1.0-2
24236   libepc-common
24237   libepc-ui-1.0-2
24238   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
24239   libfreerdp0
24240   libgconf2.0-cil
24241   libgdata-common
24242   libgdata7
24243   libgdu-gtk0
24244   libgee2
24245   libgeoclue0
24246   libgexiv2-0
24247   libgif4
24248   libglade2.0-cil
24249   libglib2.0-cil
24250   libgmime2.4-cil
24251   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
24252   libgnome2.24-cil
24253   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
24254   libgpod-common
24255   libgpod4
24256   libgtk2.0-cil
24257   libgtkglext1
24258   libgtksourceview2.0-common
24259   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
24260   libmono-addins0.2-cil
24261   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
24262   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
24263   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
24264   libmono-posix2.0-cil
24265   libmono-security2.0-cil
24266   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
24267   libmono-system2.0-cil
24268   libmtp8
24269   libmusicbrainz3-6
24270   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
24271   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
24272   libopal3.6.8
24273   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
24274   libpt2.6.7
24275   libpython2.6
24276   librpm1
24277   librpmio1
24278   libsdl1.2debian
24279   libsrtp0
24280   libssh-4
24281   libtelepathy-farsight0
24282   libtelepathy-glib0
24283   libtidy-0.99-0
24284   media-player-info
24285   mesa-utils
24286   mono-2.0-gac
24287   mono-gac
24288   mono-runtime
24289   nautilus-sendto
24290   nautilus-sendto-empathy
24291   p7zip-full
24292   pkg-config
24293   python-aptdaemon
24294   python-aptdaemon-gtk
24295   python-axiom
24296   python-beautifulsoup
24297   python-bugbuddy
24298   python-clientform
24299   python-coherence
24300   python-configobj
24301   python-crypto
24302   python-cupshelpers
24303   python-elementtree
24304   python-epsilon
24305   python-evolution
24306   python-feedparser
24307   python-gdata
24308   python-gdbm
24309   python-gst0.10
24310   python-gtkglext1
24311   python-gtksourceview2
24312   python-httplib2
24313   python-louie
24314   python-mako
24315   python-markupsafe
24316   python-mechanize
24317   python-nevow
24318   python-notify
24319   python-opengl
24320   python-openssl
24321   python-pam
24322   python-pkg-resources
24323   python-pyasn1
24324   python-pysqlite2
24325   python-rdflib
24326   python-serial
24327   python-tagpy
24328   python-twisted-bin
24329   python-twisted-conch
24330   python-twisted-core
24331   python-twisted-web
24332   python-utidylib
24333   python-webkit
24334   python-xdg
24335   python-zope.interface
24336   remmina
24337   remmina-plugin-data
24338   remmina-plugin-rdp
24339   remmina-plugin-vnc
24340   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
24341   rhythmbox-plugins
24342   rpm-common
24343   rpm2cpio
24344   seahorse-plugins
24345   shotwell
24346   software-center
24347   system-config-printer-udev
24348   telepathy-gabble
24349   telepathy-mission-control-5
24350   telepathy-salut
24351   tomboy
24352   totem
24353   totem-coherence
24354   totem-mozilla
24355   totem-plugins
24356   transmission-common
24357   xdg-user-dirs
24358   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
24359   xserver-xephyr
24360 </p></blockquote>
24361
24362 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24363
24364 <blockquote><p>
24365   cheese
24366   ekiga
24367   eog
24368   epiphany-extensions
24369   evolution-exchange
24370   fast-user-switch-applet
24371   file-roller
24372   gcalctool
24373   gconf-editor
24374   gdm
24375   gedit
24376   gedit-common
24377   gnome-games
24378   gnome-games-data
24379   gnome-nettool
24380   gnome-system-tools
24381   gnome-themes
24382   gnuchess
24383   gucharmap
24384   guile-1.8-libs
24385   libavahi-ui0
24386   libdmx1
24387   libgalago3
24388   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
24389   libgtksourceview2.0-0
24390   liblircclient0
24391   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
24392   libspeexdsp1
24393   libsvga1
24394   rhythmbox
24395   seahorse
24396   sound-juicer
24397   system-config-printer
24398   totem-common
24399   transmission-gtk
24400   vinagre
24401   vino
24402 </p></blockquote>
24403
24404 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24405
24406 <blockquote><p>
24407   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
24408 </p></blockquote>
24409
24410 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24411
24412 <blockquote><p>
24413 [nothing]
24414 </p></blockquote>
24415
24416 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
24417
24418 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24419
24420 <blockquote><p>
24421   ksmserver
24422 </p></blockquote>
24423
24424 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24425
24426 <blockquote><p>
24427   kwin
24428   network-manager-kde
24429 </p></blockquote>
24430
24431 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24432
24433 <blockquote><p>
24434   arts
24435   dolphin
24436   freespacenotifier
24437   google-gadgets-gst
24438   google-gadgets-xul
24439   kappfinder
24440   kcalc
24441   kcharselect
24442   kde-core
24443   kde-plasma-desktop
24444   kde-standard
24445   kde-window-manager
24446   kdeartwork
24447   kdeartwork-emoticons
24448   kdeartwork-style
24449   kdeartwork-theme-icon
24450   kdebase
24451   kdebase-apps
24452   kdebase-workspace
24453   kdebase-workspace-bin
24454   kdebase-workspace-data
24455   kdeeject
24456   kdelibs
24457   kdeplasma-addons
24458   kdeutils
24459   kdewallpapers
24460   kdf
24461   kfloppy
24462   kgpg
24463   khelpcenter4
24464   kinfocenter
24465   konq-plugins-l10n
24466   konqueror-nsplugins
24467   kscreensaver
24468   kscreensaver-xsavers
24469   ktimer
24470   kwrite
24471   libgle3
24472   libkde4-ruby1.8
24473   libkonq5
24474   libkonq5-templates
24475   libnetpbm10
24476   libplasma-ruby
24477   libplasma-ruby1.8
24478   libqt4-ruby1.8
24479   marble-data
24480   marble-plugins
24481   netpbm
24482   nuvola-icon-theme
24483   plasma-dataengines-workspace
24484   plasma-desktop
24485   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
24486   plasma-runners-addons
24487   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
24488   plasma-scriptengine-python
24489   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
24490   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
24491   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
24492   plasma-scriptengines
24493   plasma-wallpapers-addons
24494   plasma-widget-folderview
24495   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24496   ruby
24497   sweeper
24498   update-notifier-kde
24499   xscreensaver-data-extra
24500   xscreensaver-gl
24501   xscreensaver-gl-extra
24502   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24503 </p></blockquote>
24504
24505 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24506
24507 <blockquote><p>
24508   ark
24509   google-gadgets-common
24510   google-gadgets-qt
24511   htdig
24512   kate
24513   kdebase-bin
24514   kdebase-data
24515   kdepasswd
24516   kfind
24517   klipper
24518   konq-plugins
24519   konqueror
24520   ksysguard
24521   ksysguardd
24522   libarchive1
24523   libcln6
24524   libeet1
24525   libeina-svn-06
24526   libggadget-1.0-0b
24527   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
24528   libgps19
24529   libkdecorations4
24530   libkephal4
24531   libkonq4
24532   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
24533   libkscreensaver5
24534   libksgrd4
24535   libksignalplotter4
24536   libkunitconversion4
24537   libkwineffects1a
24538   libmarblewidget4
24539   libntrack-qt4-1
24540   libntrack0
24541   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
24542   libplasmaclock4a
24543   libplasmagenericshell4
24544   libprocesscore4a
24545   libprocessui4a
24546   libqalculate5
24547   libqedje0a
24548   libqtruby4shared2
24549   libqzion0a
24550   libruby1.8
24551   libscim8c2a
24552   libsmokekdecore4-3
24553   libsmokekdeui4-3
24554   libsmokekfile3
24555   libsmokekhtml3
24556   libsmokekio3
24557   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
24558   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
24559   libsmokekparts3
24560   libsmokektexteditor3
24561   libsmokekutils3
24562   libsmokenepomuk3
24563   libsmokephonon3
24564   libsmokeplasma3
24565   libsmokeqtcore4-3
24566   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
24567   libsmokeqtgui4-3
24568   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
24569   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
24570   libsmokeqtscript4-3
24571   libsmokeqtsql4-3
24572   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
24573   libsmokeqttest4-3
24574   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
24575   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
24576   libsmokeqtxml4-3
24577   libsmokesolid3
24578   libsmokesoprano3
24579   libtaskmanager4a
24580   libtidy-0.99-0
24581   libweather-ion4a
24582   libxklavier16
24583   libxxf86misc1
24584   okteta
24585   oxygencursors
24586   plasma-dataengines-addons
24587   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
24588   plasma-widget-lancelot
24589   plasma-widgets-addons
24590   plasma-widgets-workspace
24591   polkit-kde-1
24592   ruby1.8
24593   systemsettings
24594   update-notifier-common
24595 </p></blockquote>
24596
24597 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
24598 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
24599 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
24600 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
24601
24602       </div>
24603       <div class="tags">
24604
24605
24606         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>.
24607
24608
24609       </div>
24610     </div>
24611     <div class="padding"></div>
24612
24613     <div class="entry">
24614       <div class="title">
24615         <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>
24616       </div>
24617       <div class="date">
24618         22nd November 2010
24619       </div>
24620       <div class="body">
24621         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
24622 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
24623 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
24624 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
24625 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
24626 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
24627 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
24628 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
24629 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
24630
24631 <p>I found
24632 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
24633 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
24634 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
24635 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
24636 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
24637 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
24638
24639 <pre>
24640 #!/bin/sh
24641
24642 # Based on
24643 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
24644
24645 set -e
24646 set -x
24647
24648 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
24649     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
24650     exit 1
24651 else
24652     host="$1"
24653 fi
24654
24655 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
24656     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
24657     exit 1
24658 fi
24659
24660 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
24661 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
24662 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
24663 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
24664
24665 img=$host.img
24666 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
24667 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
24668
24669 parted $img mklabel msdos
24670 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
24671 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
24672 parted $img set 1 boot on
24673
24674 modprobe dm-mod
24675 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
24676 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
24677
24678 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
24679 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
24680 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
24681
24682 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
24683 losetup -d /dev/loop0
24684 </pre>
24685
24686 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
24687 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
24688
24689 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
24690 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
24691 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
24692 seem to work just fine.</p>
24693
24694       </div>
24695       <div class="tags">
24696
24697
24698         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>.
24699
24700
24701       </div>
24702     </div>
24703     <div class="padding"></div>
24704
24705     <div class="entry">
24706       <div class="title">
24707         <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>
24708       </div>
24709       <div class="date">
24710         20th November 2010
24711       </div>
24712       <div class="body">
24713         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
24714 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
24715 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
24716 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
24717
24718 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
24719 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
24720 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
24721
24722 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
24723
24724 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24725
24726 <blockquote><p>
24727   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
24728   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
24729   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
24730   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
24731   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
24732   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
24733   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
24734   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
24735   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
24736   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
24737   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
24738   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
24739   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
24740   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
24741   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
24742   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
24743   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
24744   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
24745   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
24746   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
24747   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
24748   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
24749   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
24750   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
24751   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
24752   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
24753   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
24754   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
24755   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
24756   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
24757   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
24758   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
24759   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
24760   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
24761   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
24762   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
24763   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
24764   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
24765   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
24766   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
24767   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
24768   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
24769   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
24770   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
24771   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
24772   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
24773   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
24774   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
24775   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
24776   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
24777   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
24778   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
24779   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
24780   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
24781   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
24782   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
24783   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
24784   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
24785   zip
24786 </p></blockquote>
24787
24788 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
24789
24790 <blockquote><p>
24791   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
24792   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
24793   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
24794   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
24795   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
24796   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
24797   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
24798   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
24799   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
24800   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
24801   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
24802   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
24803   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
24804   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
24805   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
24806   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
24807   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24808   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
24809   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
24810   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
24811   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
24812   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
24813   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
24814   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
24815   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
24816   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
24817   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
24818   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
24819   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
24820 </p></blockquote>
24821
24822 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24823
24824 <blockquote><p>
24825   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
24826 </p></blockquote>
24827
24828 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24829
24830 <blockquote><p>
24831 [nothing]
24832 </p></blockquote>
24833
24834 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
24835
24836 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24837
24838 <blockquote><p>
24839   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
24840   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
24841   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
24842   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
24843   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
24844   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
24845   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
24846   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
24847   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
24848   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
24849   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
24850   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
24851   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
24852   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
24853   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
24854   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
24855   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
24856   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
24857   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
24858   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
24859   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
24860   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
24861   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
24862   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
24863   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
24864   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
24865   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
24866   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
24867   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
24868   ttf-sazanami-gothic
24869 </p></blockquote>
24870
24871 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24872
24873 <blockquote><p>
24874   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
24875   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
24876   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
24877   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
24878   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
24879   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
24880   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
24881   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
24882   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
24883   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
24884   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
24885   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
24886   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
24887   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
24888   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
24889   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
24890   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
24891   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
24892   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
24893   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
24894   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24895   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
24896   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
24897   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
24898   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
24899   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
24900   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
24901   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
24902   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
24903   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
24904   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
24905   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
24906   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
24907 </p></blockquote>
24908
24909 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24910
24911 <blockquote><p>
24912   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
24913   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
24914   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
24915   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
24916   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24917   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
24918   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24919 </p></blockquote>
24920
24921 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24922
24923 <blockquote><p>
24924   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
24925 </p></blockquote>
24926
24927       </div>
24928       <div class="tags">
24929
24930
24931         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>.
24932
24933
24934       </div>
24935     </div>
24936     <div class="padding"></div>
24937
24938     <div class="entry">
24939       <div class="title">
24940         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
24941       </div>
24942       <div class="date">
24943         20th November 2010
24944       </div>
24945       <div class="body">
24946         <p>Answering
24947 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
24948 call from the Gnash project</a> for
24949 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
24950 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
24951 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
24952 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
24953 releases out more often.</p>
24954
24955 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
24956 I have considered setting up a <a
24957 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
24958 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
24959 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
24960 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
24961 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
24962 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
24963 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
24964 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
24965 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
24966 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
24967 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
24968 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
24969
24970       </div>
24971       <div class="tags">
24972
24973
24974         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>.
24975
24976
24977       </div>
24978     </div>
24979     <div class="padding"></div>
24980
24981     <div class="entry">
24982       <div class="title">
24983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
24984       </div>
24985       <div class="date">
24986          9th November 2010
24987       </div>
24988       <div class="body">
24989         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
24990
24991 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
24992 3D linked in from
24993 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
24994 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
24995
24996       </div>
24997       <div class="tags">
24998
24999
25000         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>.
25001
25002
25003       </div>
25004     </div>
25005     <div class="padding"></div>
25006
25007     <div class="entry">
25008       <div class="title">
25009         <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>
25010       </div>
25011       <div class="date">
25012          7th November 2010
25013       </div>
25014       <div class="body">
25015         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
25016 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
25017 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
25018 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
25019 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
25020 working using this DVD.</p>
25021
25022 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
25023 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
25024 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
25025 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
25026 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
25027 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
25028 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
25029
25030 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
25031 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
25032 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
25033 Debian archive.</p>
25034
25035 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
25036 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
25037 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
25038 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
25039 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
25040 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
25041 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
25042 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
25043 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
25044 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
25045 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
25046 free X driver should work.</p>
25047
25048 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
25049 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
25050 DVD more useful again.</p>
25051
25052       </div>
25053       <div class="tags">
25054
25055
25056         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25057
25058
25059       </div>
25060     </div>
25061     <div class="padding"></div>
25062
25063     <div class="entry">
25064       <div class="title">
25065         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
25066       </div>
25067       <div class="date">
25068         24th October 2010
25069       </div>
25070       <div class="body">
25071         <p>Some updates.</p>
25072
25073 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
25074 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
25075 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
25076 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
25077 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
25078 :)</p>
25079
25080 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
25081 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
25082 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
25083 It is called
25084 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
25085 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
25086 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
25087 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
25088 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
25089 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
25090
25091 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
25092 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
25093 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
25094 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
25095 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
25096 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
25097 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
25098 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
25099 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
25100 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
25101
25102       </div>
25103       <div class="tags">
25104
25105
25106         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>.
25107
25108
25109       </div>
25110     </div>
25111     <div class="padding"></div>
25112
25113     <div class="entry">
25114       <div class="title">
25115         <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>
25116       </div>
25117       <div class="date">
25118         19th October 2010
25119       </div>
25120       <div class="body">
25121         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
25122 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
25123 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
25124 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
25125 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
25126 AVM2 flash files.</p>
25127
25128 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
25129 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
25130 following text:</P>
25131
25132 <p><blockquote>
25133
25134   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
25135   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
25136
25137   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
25138
25139   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
25140
25141   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
25142   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
25143   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
25144   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
25145   days. The project web page is available from
25146   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
25147   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
25148   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
25149
25150   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
25151   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
25152   to get this to happen.</p>
25153
25154   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
25155   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
25156
25157 </blockquote></p>
25158
25159 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
25160 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
25161 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
25162 :)</p>
25163
25164       </div>
25165       <div class="tags">
25166
25167
25168         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>.
25169
25170
25171       </div>
25172     </div>
25173     <div class="padding"></div>
25174
25175     <div class="entry">
25176       <div class="title">
25177         <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>
25178       </div>
25179       <div class="date">
25180          9th October 2010
25181       </div>
25182       <div class="body">
25183         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
25184 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
25185 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
25186 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
25187 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
25188 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
25189 robots.</p>
25190
25191 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
25192 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
25193 a few less important features too.</p>
25194
25195 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
25196 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
25197 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
25198 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
25199
25200 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
25201 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
25202 source or binary package:</p>
25203
25204 <p><ul>
25205 <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>
25206 <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>
25207 <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>
25208 </ul></p>
25209
25210 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
25211 please let me know.</p>
25212
25213       </div>
25214       <div class="tags">
25215
25216
25217         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>.
25218
25219
25220       </div>
25221     </div>
25222     <div class="padding"></div>
25223
25224     <div class="entry">
25225       <div class="title">
25226         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
25227       </div>
25228       <div class="date">
25229          3rd October 2010
25230       </div>
25231       <div class="body">
25232         <p><ul>
25233
25234 <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
25235 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
25236
25237 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
25238 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
25239 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
25240
25241 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
25242 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
25243 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
25244 simple setup.
25245
25246 </ul></p>
25247
25248       </div>
25249       <div class="tags">
25250
25251
25252         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>.
25253
25254
25255       </div>
25256     </div>
25257     <div class="padding"></div>
25258
25259     <div class="entry">
25260       <div class="title">
25261         <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>
25262       </div>
25263       <div class="date">
25264          9th September 2010
25265       </div>
25266       <div class="body">
25267         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
25268 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
25269 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
25270 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
25271 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
25272 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
25273 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
25274 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
25275 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
25276
25277 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
25278 written:</p>
25279
25280 <blockquote>
25281 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
25282 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
25283 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
25284 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
25285 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
25286
25287 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
25288 standard.</p>
25289 </blockquote>
25290
25291 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
25292 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
25293 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
25294 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
25295
25296 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
25297 read
25298 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
25299 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
25300 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
25301 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
25302 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
25303 the issue.  The solution is to support the
25304 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
25305 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
25306 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
25307
25308       </div>
25309       <div class="tags">
25310
25311
25312         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25313
25314
25315       </div>
25316     </div>
25317     <div class="padding"></div>
25318
25319     <div class="entry">
25320       <div class="title">
25321         <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>
25322       </div>
25323       <div class="date">
25324          4th September 2010
25325       </div>
25326       <div class="body">
25327         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
25328 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
25329 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
25330 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
25331 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
25332 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
25333 installed.</p>
25334
25335 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
25336 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
25337 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
25338 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
25339 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
25340 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
25341 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
25342 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
25343 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
25344
25345 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
25346 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
25347 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
25348 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
25349 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
25350 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
25351 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
25352 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
25353 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
25354 pages they want to visit.</p>
25355
25356 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
25357 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
25358 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
25359 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
25360 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
25361 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
25362 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
25363 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
25364 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
25365 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
25366 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
25367
25368       </div>
25369       <div class="tags">
25370
25371
25372         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>.
25373
25374
25375       </div>
25376     </div>
25377     <div class="padding"></div>
25378
25379     <div class="entry">
25380       <div class="title">
25381         <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>
25382       </div>
25383       <div class="date">
25384          1st September 2010
25385       </div>
25386       <div class="body">
25387         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
25388 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
25389 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
25390 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
25391 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
25392 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
25393 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
25394 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
25395 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
25396 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
25397 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
25398 drive around.</p>
25399
25400 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
25401 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
25402
25403 <p><pre>
25404 use Spykee;
25405 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
25406 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
25407 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
25408 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
25409 $spykee->left();
25410 sleep 2;
25411 $spykee->right();
25412 sleep 2;
25413 $spykee->forward();
25414 sleep 2;
25415 $spykee->back();
25416 sleep 2;
25417 $spykee->stop();
25418 </pre></p>
25419
25420 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
25421 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
25422 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
25423 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
25424 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
25425 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
25426 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
25427 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
25428 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
25429 going. :).</p>
25430
25431 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
25432 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
25433 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
25434 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
25435
25436       </div>
25437       <div class="tags">
25438
25439
25440         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>.
25441
25442
25443       </div>
25444     </div>
25445     <div class="padding"></div>
25446
25447     <div class="entry">
25448       <div class="title">
25449         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
25450       </div>
25451       <div class="date">
25452         30th August 2010
25453       </div>
25454       <div class="body">
25455         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
25456 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
25457 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
25458 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
25459 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
25460 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
25461 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
25462
25463 <pre>
25464 % ln foo bar
25465 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
25466 %
25467 </pre>
25468
25469 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
25470 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
25471 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
25472 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
25473 nevertheless. :)</p>
25474
25475 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
25476 git from
25477 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
25478
25479       </div>
25480       <div class="tags">
25481
25482
25483         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25484
25485
25486       </div>
25487     </div>
25488     <div class="padding"></div>
25489
25490     <div class="entry">
25491       <div class="title">
25492         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
25493       </div>
25494       <div class="date">
25495         26th August 2010
25496       </div>
25497       <div class="body">
25498         <p>My file system sematics program
25499 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
25500 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
25501 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
25502 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
25503 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
25504 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
25505 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
25506 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
25507 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
25508 script:</p>
25509
25510 <pre>
25511 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
25512   mode_t retval = 0;
25513   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
25514   if (-1 != fd) {
25515     unlink(name);
25516     struct stat statbuf;
25517     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
25518       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
25519     }
25520     close(fd);
25521   }
25522   return retval;
25523 }
25524
25525 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
25526 int test_umask(void) {
25527   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
25528
25529   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
25530   mode_t newmode;
25531   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25532     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
25533            newmode);
25534   }
25535   umask(007);
25536   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25537     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
25538            newmode);
25539   }
25540
25541   umask (orig_umask);
25542   return 0;
25543 }
25544
25545 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25546   [...]
25547   test_umask();
25548   return 0;
25549 }
25550 </pre>
25551
25552 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
25553
25554 <pre>
25555 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25556 info: testing symlink creation
25557 info: testing subdirectory creation
25558 info: testing fcntl locking
25559   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25560   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25561   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25562   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25563   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25564   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25565 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25566 </pre>
25567
25568 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
25569 result:</p>
25570
25571 <pre>
25572 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25573 info: testing symlink creation
25574 info: testing subdirectory creation
25575 info: testing fcntl locking
25576   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25577   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25578   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25579   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25580   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25581   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25582 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25583   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
25584   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
25585 </pre>
25586
25587 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
25588 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
25589 directory.</p>
25590
25591 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
25592 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
25593
25594 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
25595 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
25596 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
25597
25598       </div>
25599       <div class="tags">
25600
25601
25602         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25603
25604
25605       </div>
25606     </div>
25607     <div class="padding"></div>
25608
25609     <div class="entry">
25610       <div class="title">
25611         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
25612       </div>
25613       <div class="date">
25614         15th August 2010
25615       </div>
25616       <div class="body">
25617         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
25618 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
25619 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
25620 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
25621 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
25622 long time.</p>
25623
25624       </div>
25625       <div class="tags">
25626
25627
25628         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>.
25629
25630
25631       </div>
25632     </div>
25633     <div class="padding"></div>
25634
25635     <div class="entry">
25636       <div class="title">
25637         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
25638       </div>
25639       <div class="date">
25640          9th August 2010
25641       </div>
25642       <div class="body">
25643         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
25644 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
25645 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
25646 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
25647 generated configuration.</p>
25648
25649 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
25650 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
25651 without any manual configuration.</p>
25652
25653 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
25654 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
25655 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
25656 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
25657 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
25658 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
25659 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
25660 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
25661 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
25662 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
25663 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
25664 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
25665 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
25666 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
25667 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
25668 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
25669 use.</p>
25670
25671 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
25672 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
25673 working properly out of the box:</p>
25674
25675 <ul>
25676 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
25677 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
25678 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
25679 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
25680 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
25681 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
25682 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
25683 </ul>
25684
25685 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
25686
25687 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
25688 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
25689 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
25690 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
25691 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
25692
25693 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
25694 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
25695 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
25696 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
25697 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
25698 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
25699 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
25700 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
25701
25702 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
25703 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
25704 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
25705 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
25706 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
25707 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
25708 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
25709 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
25710 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
25711 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
25712 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
25713 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
25714 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
25715 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
25716 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
25717 current DNS domain is used.</p>
25718
25719 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
25720 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
25721 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
25722 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
25723 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
25724 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
25725 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
25726 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
25727 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
25728 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
25729 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
25730 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
25731 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
25732
25733 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
25734 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
25735 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
25736 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
25737 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
25738 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
25739 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
25740 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
25741 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
25742 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
25743 do for now. :)</p>
25744
25745 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
25746 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
25747 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
25748 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
25749 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
25750 yet.</p>
25751
25752 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25753 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25754
25755 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
25756 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
25757 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
25758 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
25759
25760       </div>
25761       <div class="tags">
25762
25763
25764         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25765
25766
25767       </div>
25768     </div>
25769     <div class="padding"></div>
25770
25771     <div class="entry">
25772       <div class="title">
25773         <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>
25774       </div>
25775       <div class="date">
25776          8th August 2010
25777       </div>
25778       <div class="body">
25779         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
25780 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
25781 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
25782 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
25783 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
25784 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
25785 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
25786
25787 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
25788 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
25789 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
25790 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
25791 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
25792 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
25793 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
25794
25795 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
25796 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
25797 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
25798 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
25799 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
25800
25801 <pre>
25802 /*
25803  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
25804  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
25805  * directory.
25806  * License: GPL v2 or later
25807  *
25808  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
25809  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
25810 */
25811
25812 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
25813 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
25814 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
25815
25816 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
25817
25818 #include &lt;errno.h>
25819 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
25820 #include &lt;stdio.h>
25821 #include &lt;string.h>
25822 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
25823 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
25824 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
25825 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
25826 #include &lt;unistd.h>
25827
25828 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
25829 /*
25830  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
25831  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
25832  * below.
25833  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
25834  */
25835 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
25836 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
25837   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
25838 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
25839   char *zErrMsg;
25840   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
25841   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
25842   unlink(name);
25843   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
25844   if( rc ){
25845     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
25846     sqlite3_close(db);
25847     return -1;
25848   }
25849
25850   /* create tables */
25851   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
25852   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
25853     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
25854     sqlite3_close(db);
25855     return -1;
25856   }
25857   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
25858   sqlite3_close(db);
25859   return 0;
25860 }
25861 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25862
25863 /*
25864  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
25865  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
25866  * done in the sqlite3 library.
25867  * See also
25868  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
25869  * POSIX specification
25870  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
25871  */
25872 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
25873   struct flock fl;
25874   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
25875   unlink(name);
25876   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
25877   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
25878
25879   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
25880   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
25881   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25882   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25883   fl.l_len    = 1;
25884   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
25885   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25886
25887   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
25888   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
25889   fl.l_len    = 510;
25890   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
25891   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25892
25893   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25894   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25895   fl.l_len    = 1;
25896   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
25897   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25898
25899   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25900   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25901   fl.l_len    = 1;
25902   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
25903   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25904
25905   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
25906   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
25907   fl.l_len    = 510;
25908   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25909
25910   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
25911   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25912   fl.l_len    = 2;
25913   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
25914   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25915
25916   close(fd);
25917   return 0;
25918 }
25919
25920 /*
25921  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
25922  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
25923  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
25924  * slowing down file operations.
25925  */
25926 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
25927 #define LEVELS 5
25928   char *path = strdup("test");
25929   char *dirs[LEVELS];
25930   int level;
25931   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
25932   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
25933     char *newpath = NULL;
25934     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
25935       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
25936              path, strerror(errno));
25937       break;
25938     }
25939     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
25940     free(path);
25941     path = newpath;
25942   }
25943   return 0;
25944 }
25945
25946 /*
25947  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
25948  * KDE.
25949  */
25950 int test_symlinks(void) {
25951   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
25952   unlink("symlink");
25953   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
25954     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
25955   return 0;
25956 }
25957
25958 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25959   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
25960   test_symlinks();
25961   test_subdirectory_creation();
25962 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
25963   test_sqlite_open();
25964 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25965   test_gcompris_locking();
25966   return 0;
25967 }
25968 </pre>
25969
25970 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
25971 this:</p>
25972
25973 <pre>
25974 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25975 info: testing symlink creation
25976 info: testing subdirectory creation
25977 info: sqlite worked
25978 info: testing fcntl locking
25979   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25980   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25981   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25982   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25983   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25984   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25985 </pre>
25986
25987 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
25988 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
25989 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
25990 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
25991 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
25992 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
25993 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
25994 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
25995
25996 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
25997 it. :)</p>
25998
25999 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
26000 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
26001 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
26002
26003       </div>
26004       <div class="tags">
26005
26006
26007         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26008
26009
26010       </div>
26011     </div>
26012     <div class="padding"></div>
26013
26014     <div class="entry">
26015       <div class="title">
26016         <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>
26017       </div>
26018       <div class="date">
26019          7th August 2010
26020       </div>
26021       <div class="body">
26022         <p>A few days ago, I
26023 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
26024 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
26025 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
26026 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
26027 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
26028 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
26029 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
26030 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
26031 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
26032
26033 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
26034 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
26035 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
26036 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
26037 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
26038 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
26039 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
26040 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
26041 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
26042 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
26043 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
26044 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
26045 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
26046 gave it a IP address.</p>
26047
26048 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
26049 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
26050 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
26051 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
26052 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
26053 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
26054 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
26055 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
26056
26057 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
26058 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
26059 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
26060 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
26061 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
26062 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
26063
26064 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
26065 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
26066 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
26067 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
26068 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
26069 with UID and GID values.</p>
26070
26071 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
26072 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26073
26074       </div>
26075       <div class="tags">
26076
26077
26078         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26079
26080
26081       </div>
26082     </div>
26083     <div class="padding"></div>
26084
26085     <div class="entry">
26086       <div class="title">
26087         <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>
26088       </div>
26089       <div class="date">
26090          3rd August 2010
26091       </div>
26092       <div class="body">
26093         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
26094 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
26095 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
26096 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
26097 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
26098 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
26099 servers.</p>
26100
26101 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
26102 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
26103 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
26104 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
26105 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
26106 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
26107 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
26108 .uio.no.</p>
26109
26110 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
26111 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
26112 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
26113 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
26114 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
26115 university servers.</p>
26116
26117 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
26118 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
26119 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
26120 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
26121 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
26122 uses.</p>
26123
26124       </div>
26125       <div class="tags">
26126
26127
26128         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26129
26130
26131       </div>
26132     </div>
26133     <div class="padding"></div>
26134
26135     <div class="entry">
26136       <div class="title">
26137         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
26138       </div>
26139       <div class="date">
26140         27th July 2010
26141       </div>
26142       <div class="body">
26143         <p>I discovered this while doing
26144 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
26145 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
26146 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
26147 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
26148 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
26149
26150 <p>An example is from todays
26151 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
26152 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
26153 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
26154 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
26155 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
26156 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
26157 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
26158
26159 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
26160
26161 <blockquote><pre>
26162 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
26163  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
26164   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
26165 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
26166  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
26167 </pre></blockquote>
26168
26169 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
26170 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
26171 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
26172 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
26173 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
26174 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
26175 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
26176 of dependency loops.</p>
26177
26178 <p>Thanks to
26179 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
26180 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
26181 dependencies
26182 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
26183 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
26184
26185 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
26186 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
26187 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
26188 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
26189 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
26190 it.</p>
26191
26192       </div>
26193       <div class="tags">
26194
26195
26196         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
26197
26198
26199       </div>
26200     </div>
26201     <div class="padding"></div>
26202
26203     <div class="entry">
26204       <div class="title">
26205         <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>
26206       </div>
26207       <div class="date">
26208         27th July 2010
26209       </div>
26210       <div class="body">
26211         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
26212 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
26213 completed.</p>
26214
26215 <blockquote>
26216 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
26217 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
26218 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
26219 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
26220 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
26221 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
26222 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
26223 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
26224
26225 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
26226 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
26227 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
26228
26229 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
26230 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
26231 much.</p>
26232
26233 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
26234
26235 <ul>
26236 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
26237 <ul>
26238   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
26239          combination with some new artwork
26240   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
26241   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
26242   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
26243   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
26244   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
26245   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
26246   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
26247   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
26248   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
26249 </ul></li>
26250 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
26251     Enabled for:
26252 <ul>
26253   <li>PAM
26254   <li>LDAP
26255   <li>IMAP
26256   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
26257 </ul>
26258 </li>
26259 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
26260 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
26261     fetched from LDAP.</li>
26262 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
26263 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
26264 </ul>
26265 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
26266
26267 <ul>
26268 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
26269     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
26270     for testing.</li>
26271 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
26272     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
26273     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
26274 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
26275 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
26276 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
26277 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
26278     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
26279 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
26280     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
26281     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
26282 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
26283     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
26284     and help out with translations.</li>
26285 </ul>
26286
26287 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
26288
26289 <ul>
26290 <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>
26291 <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>
26292 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26293 </ul>
26294 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
26295
26296 <ul>
26297 <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>
26298 <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>
26299 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26300 </ul>
26301
26302 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
26303 get closer to the final release.</p>
26304
26305 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
26306
26307 <ul>
26308 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26309 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26310 </ul>
26311
26312 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
26313 <ul>
26314 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26315 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26316 </ul>
26317 <p>How to report bugs:
26318 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
26319
26320 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
26321 </blockquote>
26322
26323       </div>
26324       <div class="tags">
26325
26326
26327         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26328
26329
26330       </div>
26331     </div>
26332     <div class="padding"></div>
26333
26334     <div class="entry">
26335       <div class="title">
26336         <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>
26337       </div>
26338       <div class="date">
26339         25th July 2010
26340       </div>
26341       <div class="body">
26342         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
26343 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
26344 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
26345 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
26346 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
26347
26348 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
26349 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
26350 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
26351 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
26352 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
26353 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
26354 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
26355
26356 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
26357 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
26358 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
26359 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
26360 up. :)</p>
26361
26362 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
26363 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
26364 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
26365
26366 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
26367 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
26368 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
26369 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
26370 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
26371 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
26372 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
26373 release another day.</p>
26374
26375 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
26376 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26377
26378       </div>
26379       <div class="tags">
26380
26381
26382         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26383
26384
26385       </div>
26386     </div>
26387     <div class="padding"></div>
26388
26389     <div class="entry">
26390       <div class="title">
26391         <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>
26392       </div>
26393       <div class="date">
26394         18th July 2010
26395       </div>
26396       <div class="body">
26397         <p>Thanks to
26398 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
26399 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
26400 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
26401 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
26402 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
26403 only available from the development server, until more experience is
26404 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
26405
26406 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
26407 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
26408 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
26409 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
26410 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
26411 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
26412 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
26413
26414       </div>
26415       <div class="tags">
26416
26417
26418         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>.
26419
26420
26421       </div>
26422     </div>
26423     <div class="padding"></div>
26424
26425     <div class="entry">
26426       <div class="title">
26427         <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>
26428       </div>
26429       <div class="date">
26430         17th July 2010
26431       </div>
26432       <div class="body">
26433         <p>This is a
26434 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
26435 on my
26436 <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
26437 work</a> on
26438 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
26439 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
26440
26441 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
26442 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
26443 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
26444 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
26445
26446 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
26447 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
26448 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
26449
26450 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
26451
26452 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
26453 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
26454 the web.
26455
26456 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
26457 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
26458 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
26459 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
26460 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
26461 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
26462
26463 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
26464 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
26465 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
26466 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
26467 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
26468 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
26469 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
26470 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
26471 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
26472 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
26473 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
26474 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
26475 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
26476 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
26477 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
26478 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
26479
26480 <blockquote><pre>
26481 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26482   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26483   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26484   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26485   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26486   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26487   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26488
26489 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26490   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26491   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
26492   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
26493   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
26494   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
26495 </pre></blockquote>
26496
26497 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
26498 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
26499 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
26500 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26501 also exist.</p>
26502
26503 <blockquote><pre>
26504 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26505 objectclass: top
26506 objectclass: dnsdomain
26507 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26508 dc: tjener
26509 arecord: 10.0.2.2
26510 associateddomain: tjener.intern
26511
26512 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26513 objectclass: top
26514 objectclass: dnsdomain2
26515 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26516 dc: 2
26517 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
26518 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
26519 </pre></blockquote>
26520
26521 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
26522 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
26523 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
26524 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
26525 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
26526 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
26527 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
26528 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
26529 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
26530 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
26531 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
26532 instead.</p>
26533
26534 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
26535 like this:</p>
26536
26537 <blockquote><pre>
26538 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26539   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26540   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26541   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26542   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26543   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26544
26545 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26546   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
26547 </pre></blockquote>
26548
26549 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
26550 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
26551 reverse lookups.</p>
26552
26553 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
26554 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
26555 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
26556 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
26557
26558 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
26559 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
26560 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
26561
26562 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
26563 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
26564 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
26565 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
26566 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
26567
26568 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
26569 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
26570 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
26571 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
26572 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
26573
26574 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
26575 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
26576 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
26577 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
26578 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
26579 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
26580
26581 <blockquote><pre>
26582 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
26583     SUP top
26584     AUXILIARY
26585     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
26586           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
26587           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
26588           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
26589           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
26590     ))
26591 </pre></blockquote>
26592
26593 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
26594 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
26595 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
26596 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
26597 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
26598 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
26599
26600 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
26601
26602 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
26603 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
26604 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
26605 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
26606 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
26607
26608 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
26609 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
26610 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
26611 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
26612
26613 <blockquote><pre>
26614 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
26615 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
26616 </pre></blockquote>
26617
26618 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
26619 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
26620 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
26621 search result is this entry:</p>
26622
26623 <blockquote><pre>
26624 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26625 cn: dhcp
26626 objectClass: top
26627 objectClass: dhcpServer
26628 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26629 </pre></blockquote>
26630
26631 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
26632 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
26633 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
26634 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
26635 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
26636 The search result is this entry:</p>
26637
26638 <blockquote><pre>
26639 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26640 cn: DHCP Config
26641 objectClass: top
26642 objectClass: dhcpService
26643 objectClass: dhcpOptions
26644 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26645 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
26646 dhcpStatements: authoritative
26647 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
26648 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
26649 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
26650 </pre></blockquote>
26651
26652 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
26653 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
26654 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
26655 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
26656 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
26657 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
26658 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
26659 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
26660 related computer objects.</p>
26661
26662 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
26663 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
26664 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
26665 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
26666 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
26667 like:</p>
26668
26669 <blockquote><pre>
26670 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26671 cn: hostname
26672 objectClass: top
26673 objectClass: dhcpHost
26674 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26675 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
26676 </pre></blockquote>
26677
26678 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
26679 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
26680 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
26681 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
26682 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
26683 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
26684 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
26685 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
26686 structural object class.
26687
26688 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
26689
26690 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
26691 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
26692 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
26693 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
26694 in the configuration.</p>
26695
26696 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
26697 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
26698 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
26699 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
26700 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
26701 structure.</p>
26702
26703 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
26704 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
26705
26706 <blockquote><pre>
26707 ou=services
26708   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
26709     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
26710     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
26711       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
26712         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
26713     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
26714       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
26715         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
26716     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
26717       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
26718 </pre></blockquote>
26719
26720 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
26721 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
26722 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
26723 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
26724
26725 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
26726 like this:</p>
26727
26728 <blockquote><pre>
26729 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26730 dc: hostname
26731 objectClass: top
26732 objectClass: dhcpHost
26733 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26734 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
26735 associateddomain: hostname.intern
26736 arecord: 10.11.12.13
26737 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26738 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
26739 </pre></blockquote>
26740
26741 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
26742 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
26743 auxiliary object class.</p>
26744
26745       </div>
26746       <div class="tags">
26747
26748
26749         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>.
26750
26751
26752       </div>
26753     </div>
26754     <div class="padding"></div>
26755
26756     <div class="entry">
26757       <div class="title">
26758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
26759       </div>
26760       <div class="date">
26761         14th July 2010
26762       </div>
26763       <div class="body">
26764         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
26765 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
26766 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
26767 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
26768 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
26769
26770 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
26771 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
26772
26773 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
26774 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
26775 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
26776 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
26777 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
26778 to a slave DNS server.</p>
26779
26780 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
26781 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
26782 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
26783 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
26784 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
26785 seem to work.</p>
26786
26787 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
26788 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
26789 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
26790 this:</p>
26791
26792 <blockquote><pre>
26793   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26794   cn: hostname
26795   objectClass: dhcphost
26796   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26797   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
26798   associateddomain: hostname.intern
26799   arecord: 10.11.12.13
26800   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26801   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
26802   ldapconfigsound: Y
26803 </pre></blockquote>
26804
26805 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
26806 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
26807 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
26808 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
26809
26810 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
26811 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
26812 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
26813 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
26814 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
26815 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
26816 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
26817 might be a good place to put it.</p>
26818
26819 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26820 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26821
26822       </div>
26823       <div class="tags">
26824
26825
26826         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>.
26827
26828
26829       </div>
26830     </div>
26831     <div class="padding"></div>
26832
26833     <div class="entry">
26834       <div class="title">
26835         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
26836       </div>
26837       <div class="date">
26838         11th July 2010
26839       </div>
26840       <div class="body">
26841         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
26842 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
26843 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
26844 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
26845
26846 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
26847 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
26848 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
26849 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
26850 LTSP clients.</p>
26851
26852 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
26853 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
26854 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
26855
26856 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
26857 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
26858 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
26859
26860 <blockquote><pre>
26861 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
26862 #
26863 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
26864 #
26865 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
26866 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
26867 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
26868 #
26869 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
26870 # existence of attribute names.
26871 #
26872 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
26873 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
26874 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
26875 #
26876 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
26877 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
26878 #
26879 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
26880 #     SUP top
26881 #     AUXILIARY
26882 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
26883
26884 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
26885 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
26886     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
26887     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
26888         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
26889         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
26890             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
26891             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
26892             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
26893             # bass value on to clients
26894             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
26895         done
26896     done
26897 fi
26898 </pre></blockquote>
26899
26900 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
26901 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
26902 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
26903 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
26904 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
26905
26906 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26907 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26908
26909 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
26910 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
26911 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
26912 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
26913 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
26914 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
26915
26916       </div>
26917       <div class="tags">
26918
26919
26920         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>.
26921
26922
26923       </div>
26924     </div>
26925     <div class="padding"></div>
26926
26927     <div class="entry">
26928       <div class="title">
26929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
26930       </div>
26931       <div class="date">
26932          9th July 2010
26933       </div>
26934       <div class="body">
26935         <p>Since
26936 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
26937 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
26938 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
26939 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
26940 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
26941 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
26942 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
26943 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
26944 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
26945 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
26946 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
26947 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
26948 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
26949
26950       </div>
26951       <div class="tags">
26952
26953
26954         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>.
26955
26956
26957       </div>
26958     </div>
26959     <div class="padding"></div>
26960
26961     <div class="entry">
26962       <div class="title">
26963         <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>
26964       </div>
26965       <div class="date">
26966          3rd July 2010
26967       </div>
26968       <div class="body">
26969         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
26970 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
26971 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
26972 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
26973 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
26974 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
26975 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
26976 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
26977
26978 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
26979 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
26980 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
26981 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
26982 publish the difference.</p>
26983
26984 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
26985
26986 <blockquote><p>
26987   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
26988   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
26989   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
26990   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
26991   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
26992   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26993   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
26994   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
26995 </p></blockquote>
26996
26997 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
26998
26999 <blockquote><p>
27000   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
27001   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
27002   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
27003   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
27004   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
27005   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
27006   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
27007   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
27008   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
27009   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
27010   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
27011   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
27012   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
27013   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
27014   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
27015   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
27016   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
27017   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
27018   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
27019   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
27020 </p></blockquote>
27021
27022 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27023
27024 <blockquote><p>
27025   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
27026   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
27027   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27028   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27029   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
27030   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
27031   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
27032   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27033   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27034   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27035   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27036   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
27037   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
27038   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
27039   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
27040   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
27041   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
27042   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
27043   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
27044   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
27045   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
27046 </p></blockquote>
27047
27048 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27049
27050 <blockquote><p>
27051   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
27052   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
27053   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
27054 </p></blockquote>
27055
27056 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
27057 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
27058 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
27059 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
27060 the difference somewhat.
27061
27062       </div>
27063       <div class="tags">
27064
27065
27066         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>.
27067
27068
27069       </div>
27070     </div>
27071     <div class="padding"></div>
27072
27073     <div class="entry">
27074       <div class="title">
27075         <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>
27076       </div>
27077       <div class="date">
27078          1st July 2010
27079       </div>
27080       <div class="body">
27081         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
27082 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
27083 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
27084 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
27085 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
27086 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
27087 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
27088 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
27089 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
27090
27091 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
27092
27093 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
27094 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
27095 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
27096 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
27097 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
27098 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
27099 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
27100 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
27101 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
27102 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
27103 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
27104 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
27105 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
27106 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
27107 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
27108
27109 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
27110
27111 <blockquote><pre>
27112 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
27113 </pre></blockquote>
27114
27115 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
27116 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
27117 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
27118 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
27119 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
27120 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
27121 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
27122 on how to get this working.</p>
27123
27124 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
27125 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
27126 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
27127 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
27128 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
27129 instructions I found in the
27130 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
27131 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
27132
27133 <blockquote><pre>
27134         debug-level             0
27135         reload-count            unlimited
27136         paranoia                no
27137
27138         enable-cache            passwd          yes
27139         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
27140         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
27141         suggested-size          passwd          211
27142         check-files             passwd          yes
27143         persistent              passwd          yes
27144         shared                  passwd          yes
27145         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
27146         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
27147
27148         enable-cache            group           yes
27149         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
27150         negative-time-to-live   group           20
27151         suggested-size          group           211
27152         check-files             group           yes
27153         persistent              group           yes
27154         shared                  group           yes
27155         max-db-size             group           33554432
27156         auto-propagate          group           yes
27157
27158         enable-cache            hosts           no
27159         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
27160         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
27161         suggested-size          hosts           211
27162         check-files             hosts           yes
27163         persistent              hosts           yes
27164         shared                  hosts           yes
27165         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
27166
27167         enable-cache            services        yes
27168         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
27169         negative-time-to-live   services        20
27170         suggested-size          services        211
27171         check-files             services        yes
27172         persistent              services        yes
27173         shared                  services        yes
27174         max-db-size             services        33554432
27175 </pre></blockquote>
27176
27177 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
27178 automatically like the one provided in
27179 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
27180 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
27181 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
27182 look like this:</p>
27183
27184 <blockquote><pre>
27185 passwd:         files ldap
27186 group:          files ldap
27187 shadow:         files ldap
27188 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
27189 networks:       files
27190 protocols:      files
27191 services:       files
27192 ethers:         files
27193 rpc:            files
27194 netgroup:       files ldap
27195 </pre></blockquote>
27196
27197 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
27198 shadow and netgroup.</p>
27199
27200 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
27201 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
27202 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
27203 attributes cached.
27204
27205 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
27206   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
27207
27208 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
27209 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
27210 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
27211 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
27212 discovered sssd.</p>
27213
27214 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
27215
27216 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
27217 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
27218 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
27219 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
27220 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
27221 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
27222 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
27223 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
27224 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
27225 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
27226 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
27227 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
27228 version 1.2 is now in testing.
27229
27230 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
27231 roaming setup I want</p>
27232
27233 <blockquote><pre>
27234 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
27235 </pre></blockquote>
27236
27237 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
27238 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
27239
27240 <blockquote><pre>
27241 [sssd]
27242 config_file_version = 2
27243 reconnection_retries = 3
27244 sbus_timeout = 30
27245 services = nss, pam
27246 domains = INTERN
27247
27248 [nss]
27249 filter_groups = root
27250 filter_users = root
27251 reconnection_retries = 3
27252
27253 [pam]
27254 reconnection_retries = 3
27255
27256 [domain/INTERN]
27257 enumerate = false
27258 cache_credentials = true
27259
27260 id_provider = ldap
27261 auth_provider = ldap
27262 chpass_provider = ldap
27263
27264 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
27265 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27266 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
27267 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
27268 </pre></blockquote>
27269
27270 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
27271 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
27272
27273 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
27274 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
27275 modify it manually.</p>
27276
27277 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27278 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27279
27280       </div>
27281       <div class="tags">
27282
27283
27284         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27285
27286
27287       </div>
27288     </div>
27289     <div class="padding"></div>
27290
27291     <div class="entry">
27292       <div class="title">
27293         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
27294       </div>
27295       <div class="date">
27296         28th June 2010
27297       </div>
27298       <div class="body">
27299         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
27300 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
27301 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
27302 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
27303 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
27304 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
27305 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
27306 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
27307 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
27308 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
27309
27310 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
27311 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
27312 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
27313 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
27314 released.</p>
27315
27316 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
27317 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
27318 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
27319 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
27320
27321 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
27322 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27323
27324 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
27325 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
27326 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
27327 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
27328 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
27329
27330       </div>
27331       <div class="tags">
27332
27333
27334         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>.
27335
27336
27337       </div>
27338     </div>
27339     <div class="padding"></div>
27340
27341     <div class="entry">
27342       <div class="title">
27343         <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>
27344       </div>
27345       <div class="date">
27346         24th June 2010
27347       </div>
27348       <div class="body">
27349         <p>A while back, I
27350 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
27351 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
27352 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
27353 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
27354
27355 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
27356 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
27357 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
27358 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
27359
27360 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
27361 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
27362 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
27363 Debian Edu.</p>
27364
27365 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
27366 the
27367 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
27368 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
27369 available today from IETF.</p>
27370
27371 <pre>
27372 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
27373 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
27374 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
27375  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
27376         NAME 'dhcpHost'
27377         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
27378 -       SUP top
27379 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
27380         MUST cn
27381         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
27382         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
27383 </pre>
27384
27385 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
27386 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
27387 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
27388
27389 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27390 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27391
27392       </div>
27393       <div class="tags">
27394
27395
27396         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>.
27397
27398
27399       </div>
27400     </div>
27401     <div class="padding"></div>
27402
27403     <div class="entry">
27404       <div class="title">
27405         <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>
27406       </div>
27407       <div class="date">
27408         16th June 2010
27409       </div>
27410       <div class="body">
27411         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
27412 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
27413 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
27414 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
27415 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
27416 this:
27417
27418 <blockquote><pre>
27419 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27420 tasksel --new-install
27421 </pre></blockquote>
27422
27423 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
27424 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
27425 any output what so ever.
27426
27427 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
27428 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
27429 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
27430 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
27431 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
27432 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
27433 code like this:
27434
27435 <blockquote><pre>
27436 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27437 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
27438 $cmd
27439 </pre></blockquote>
27440
27441 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
27442 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
27443 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
27444 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
27445 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
27446 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
27447 installation.</p>
27448
27449 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
27450 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
27451 like this.</p>
27452
27453       </div>
27454       <div class="tags">
27455
27456
27457         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
27458
27459
27460       </div>
27461     </div>
27462     <div class="padding"></div>
27463
27464     <div class="entry">
27465       <div class="title">
27466         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
27467       </div>
27468       <div class="date">
27469         13th June 2010
27470       </div>
27471       <div class="body">
27472         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
27473 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
27474 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
27475 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
27476 pages.</p>
27477
27478 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
27479 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
27480 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
27481 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
27482 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
27483 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
27484 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
27485 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
27486 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
27487 see how the project is doing.</p>
27488
27489 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
27490 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
27491 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
27492 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
27493 Windows.  This is great.</p>
27494
27495       </div>
27496       <div class="tags">
27497
27498
27499         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>.
27500
27501
27502       </div>
27503     </div>
27504     <div class="padding"></div>
27505
27506     <div class="entry">
27507       <div class="title">
27508         <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>
27509       </div>
27510       <div class="date">
27511         13th June 2010
27512       </div>
27513       <div class="body">
27514         <p>My
27515 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
27516 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
27517 finally made the upgrade logs available from
27518 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
27519 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
27520 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
27521 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
27522
27523 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
27524 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
27525 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
27526 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
27527 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
27528 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
27529 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
27530 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
27531
27532 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
27533 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
27534 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
27535 too surprising.</p>
27536
27537 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
27538 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
27539 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
27540 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
27541 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
27542 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
27543 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
27544 continue.</p>
27545
27546 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
27547 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
27548   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
27549   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
27550   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
27551   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
27552   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
27553   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27554   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27555   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
27556   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
27557   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
27558   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
27559   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27560   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27561   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27562   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27563   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27564   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
27565   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
27566   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
27567   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
27568   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
27569   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
27570   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
27571   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
27572   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
27573   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
27574   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
27575   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
27576
27577 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
27578
27579 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
27580   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
27581   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
27582   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
27583   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
27584   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
27585   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
27586   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
27587   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
27588   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
27589   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
27590   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
27591   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
27592   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
27593   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
27594   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
27595   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
27596   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
27597   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
27598   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
27599   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
27600   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
27601   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
27602   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
27603   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
27604   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
27605   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
27606   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
27607   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
27608   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27609   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
27610   zip</p>
27611
27612 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
27613
27614 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
27615   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
27616   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
27617   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
27618   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
27619   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
27620   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27621   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27622   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
27623   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
27624   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
27625   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
27626   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27627   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27628   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27629   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27630   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27631   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
27632   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
27633   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
27634   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
27635   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
27636   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
27637   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
27638   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
27639   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
27640   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
27641   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
27642
27643 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
27644 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
27645   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
27646   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
27647   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
27648   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
27649   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
27650   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
27651   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
27652   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
27653   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
27654   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
27655   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
27656   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
27657   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
27658   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
27659   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
27660   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
27661   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
27662   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
27663   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
27664   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
27665   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
27666   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
27667   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
27668   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
27669   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
27670   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
27671   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
27672   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
27673   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
27674   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
27675   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
27676   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
27677   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
27678   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27679   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
27680   xulrunner-1.9</p>
27681
27682
27683       </div>
27684       <div class="tags">
27685
27686
27687         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>.
27688
27689
27690       </div>
27691     </div>
27692     <div class="padding"></div>
27693
27694     <div class="entry">
27695       <div class="title">
27696         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
27697       </div>
27698       <div class="date">
27699         11th June 2010
27700       </div>
27701       <div class="body">
27702         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
27703 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
27704 have been discovered and reported in the process
27705 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
27706 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
27707 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
27708 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
27709 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
27710
27711 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
27712 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
27713 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
27714 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
27715 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
27716 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
27717
27718 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
27719 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
27720 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
27721 is created.  The bug report
27722 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
27723 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
27724 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
27725 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
27726 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
27727 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
27728 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
27729 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
27730 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
27731 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
27732 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
27733 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
27734 Debian Squeeze.</p>
27735
27736 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
27737 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
27738 trick:</p>
27739
27740 <blockquote><pre>
27741 #!/bin/sh
27742 set -ex
27743
27744 if [ "$1" ] ; then
27745     desktop=$1
27746 else
27747     desktop=gnome
27748 fi
27749
27750 from=lenny
27751 to=squeeze
27752
27753 exec &lt; /dev/null
27754 unset LANG
27755 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
27756 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
27757 fuser -mv .
27758 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
27759 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
27760 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
27761 #!/bin/sh
27762 exit 101
27763 EOF
27764 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
27765 exit_cleanup() {
27766     umount $tmpdir/proc
27767 }
27768 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
27769 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
27770 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
27771
27772 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
27773
27774 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
27775 # to return the correct answers.
27776 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
27777     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
27778
27779 # Include the desktop and laptop task
27780 for test in desktop laptop ; do
27781     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
27782 #!/bin/sh
27783 exit 2
27784 EOF
27785     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
27786 done
27787
27788 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27789 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
27790 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
27791 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
27792
27793 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
27794 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
27795 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
27796 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
27797 fuser -mv
27798 </pre></blockquote>
27799
27800 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
27801 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
27802 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
27803 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
27804 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
27805 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
27806
27807 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
27808 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
27809 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
27810 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
27811 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
27812 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
27813 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
27814
27815 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
27816 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
27817 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
27818 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
27819 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
27820 packages.</p>
27821
27822       </div>
27823       <div class="tags">
27824
27825
27826         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>.
27827
27828
27829       </div>
27830     </div>
27831     <div class="padding"></div>
27832
27833     <div class="entry">
27834       <div class="title">
27835         <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>
27836       </div>
27837       <div class="date">
27838          6th June 2010
27839       </div>
27840       <div class="body">
27841         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
27842 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
27843 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
27844 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
27845 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
27846 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
27847 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
27848
27849 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
27850 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
27851 COLUMNS):</p>
27852
27853 <blockquote><pre>
27854 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
27855 previous=N
27856 PREVLEVEL=
27857 RUNLEVEL=
27858 runlevel=S
27859 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
27860 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
27861 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
27862 </pre></blockquote>
27863
27864 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
27865 script.</p>
27866
27867 <blockquote><pre>
27868 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
27869 previous=N
27870 PREVLEVEL=N
27871 RUNLEVEL=S
27872 runlevel=S
27873 </pre></blockquote>
27874
27875 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
27876 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
27877 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
27878
27879 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
27880 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
27881 choice.</p>
27882
27883       </div>
27884       <div class="tags">
27885
27886
27887         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>.
27888
27889
27890       </div>
27891     </div>
27892     <div class="padding"></div>
27893
27894     <div class="entry">
27895       <div class="title">
27896         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
27897       </div>
27898       <div class="date">
27899          6th June 2010
27900       </div>
27901       <div class="body">
27902         <p>Via the
27903 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
27904 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
27905 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
27906 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
27907 following the standards wars of today.</p>
27908
27909       </div>
27910       <div class="tags">
27911
27912
27913         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>.
27914
27915
27916       </div>
27917     </div>
27918     <div class="padding"></div>
27919
27920     <div class="entry">
27921       <div class="title">
27922         <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>
27923       </div>
27924       <div class="date">
27925          3rd June 2010
27926       </div>
27927       <div class="body">
27928         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
27929 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
27930 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
27931 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
27932 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
27933
27934 <blockquote><pre>
27935 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
27936   vendor                    count
27937   Dell Computer Corporation     1
27938     PowerEdge 1750              1
27939   IBM                           1
27940     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
27941   Intel                         2
27942   [no-dmi-info]                 3
27943 maintainer:~#
27944 </pre></blockquote>
27945
27946 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
27947 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
27948 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
27949 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
27950 option to list the individual machines.</p>
27951
27952 <p>A larger list is
27953 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
27954 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
27955 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
27956 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
27957 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
27958 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
27959 collector.</p>
27960
27961       </div>
27962       <div class="tags">
27963
27964
27965         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>.
27966
27967
27968       </div>
27969     </div>
27970     <div class="padding"></div>
27971
27972     <div class="entry">
27973       <div class="title">
27974         <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>
27975       </div>
27976       <div class="date">
27977          1st June 2010
27978       </div>
27979       <div class="body">
27980         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
27981 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
27982 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
27983 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
27984 wait.</p>
27985
27986 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
27987 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
27988 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
27989 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
27990 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
27991 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
27992
27993 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
27994 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
27995 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
27996 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
27997 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
27998 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
27999 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
28000 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
28001
28002 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
28003
28004       </div>
28005       <div class="tags">
28006
28007
28008         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>.
28009
28010
28011       </div>
28012     </div>
28013     <div class="padding"></div>
28014
28015     <div class="entry">
28016       <div class="title">
28017         <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>
28018       </div>
28019       <div class="date">
28020         27th May 2010
28021       </div>
28022       <div class="body">
28023         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
28024 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
28025 issues are known and should be solved:
28026
28027 <p><ul>
28028
28029 <li>The wicd package seen to
28030 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
28031 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
28032 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
28033 seem to be on the case.</li>
28034
28035 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
28036 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
28037 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
28038 maintainer is on the case.</li>
28039
28040 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
28041 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
28042 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
28043 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
28044 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
28045 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
28046 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
28047 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
28048
28049 </ul></p>
28050
28051 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
28052 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
28053 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
28054 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
28055
28056 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28057 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28058 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28059 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28060
28061 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
28062
28063       </div>
28064       <div class="tags">
28065
28066
28067         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>.
28068
28069
28070       </div>
28071     </div>
28072     <div class="padding"></div>
28073
28074     <div class="entry">
28075       <div class="title">
28076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
28077       </div>
28078       <div class="date">
28079         22nd May 2010
28080       </div>
28081       <div class="body">
28082         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
28083 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
28084 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
28085 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
28086
28087 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
28088 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
28089 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
28090 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
28091 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
28092 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
28093 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
28094 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
28095 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
28096 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
28097 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
28098 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
28099 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
28100 going to work.</p>
28101
28102 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
28103 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
28104 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
28105 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
28106 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
28107 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
28108 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
28109 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
28110 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
28111 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
28112 Edu.</p>
28113
28114 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
28115 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
28116 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
28117 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
28118 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
28119 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
28120
28121 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
28122 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
28123
28124       </div>
28125       <div class="tags">
28126
28127
28128         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>.
28129
28130
28131       </div>
28132     </div>
28133     <div class="padding"></div>
28134
28135     <div class="entry">
28136       <div class="title">
28137         <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>
28138       </div>
28139       <div class="date">
28140         19th May 2010
28141       </div>
28142       <div class="body">
28143         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
28144 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
28145 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
28146 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
28147 into unstable.  The
28148 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
28149 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
28150 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
28151 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
28152 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
28153 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
28154 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
28155
28156 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
28157 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
28158 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
28159 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
28160 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
28161 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
28162 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
28163 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
28164
28165 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
28166 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
28167 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
28168 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
28169 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
28170 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
28171 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
28172
28173 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
28174 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
28175 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
28176 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
28177 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
28178 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
28179 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
28180 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
28181 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
28182 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
28183 on the home directory servers.</p>
28184
28185 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
28186 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
28187 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
28188 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
28189 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
28190 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
28191
28192 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28193 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28194
28195       </div>
28196       <div class="tags">
28197
28198
28199         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28200
28201
28202       </div>
28203     </div>
28204     <div class="padding"></div>
28205
28206     <div class="entry">
28207       <div class="title">
28208         <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>
28209       </div>
28210       <div class="date">
28211         14th May 2010
28212       </div>
28213       <div class="body">
28214         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
28215 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
28216 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
28217 expected, if I am to believe the
28218 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
28219 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
28220 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
28221 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
28222 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
28223 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
28224 version.</p>
28225
28226 More information about
28227 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28228 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
28229 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
28230 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
28231
28232 <blockquote><pre>
28233 CONCURRENCY=none
28234 </pre></blockquote>
28235
28236 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28237 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28238 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28239 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28240
28241       </div>
28242       <div class="tags">
28243
28244
28245         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>.
28246
28247
28248       </div>
28249     </div>
28250     <div class="padding"></div>
28251
28252     <div class="entry">
28253       <div class="title">
28254         <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>
28255       </div>
28256       <div class="date">
28257         14th May 2010
28258       </div>
28259       <div class="body">
28260         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
28261 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
28262 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
28263 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
28264 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
28265 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
28266 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
28267 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
28268
28269 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
28270 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
28271 this on the collector host:</p>
28272
28273 <blockquote><pre>
28274 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
28275 </pre></blockquote>
28276
28277 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
28278 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
28279
28280 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
28281 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
28282 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
28283 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
28284 written yet.</p>
28285
28286       </div>
28287       <div class="tags">
28288
28289
28290         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>.
28291
28292
28293       </div>
28294     </div>
28295     <div class="padding"></div>
28296
28297     <div class="entry">
28298       <div class="title">
28299         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
28300       </div>
28301       <div class="date">
28302         13th May 2010
28303       </div>
28304       <div class="body">
28305         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
28306 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
28307 has been
28308 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
28309
28310 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
28311 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
28312 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
28313 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
28314 based boot system.  Tollef is
28315 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
28316 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
28317 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
28318 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
28319 at the moment do not.</p>
28320
28321 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
28322 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
28323 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
28324 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
28325 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
28326 way forward.</p>
28327
28328 <p>In the mean time, based on the
28329 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
28330 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
28331 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
28332 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
28333 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
28334 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
28335 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
28336 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
28337
28338       </div>
28339       <div class="tags">
28340
28341
28342         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>.
28343
28344
28345       </div>
28346     </div>
28347     <div class="padding"></div>
28348
28349     <div class="entry">
28350       <div class="title">
28351         <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>
28352       </div>
28353       <div class="date">
28354          6th May 2010
28355       </div>
28356       <div class="body">
28357         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
28358 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
28359 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
28360 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
28361 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28362 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
28363 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
28364
28365 <blockquote><pre>
28366 CONCURRENCY=makefile
28367 </pre></blockquote>
28368
28369 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
28370 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
28371 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
28372 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
28373 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
28374 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
28375 make this happen.</p>
28376
28377 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
28378 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
28379 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
28380 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
28381 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
28382
28383 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
28384 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
28385 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
28386 fix the remaining issues.</p>
28387
28388 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28389 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28390 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28391 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28392
28393       </div>
28394       <div class="tags">
28395
28396
28397         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>.
28398
28399
28400       </div>
28401     </div>
28402     <div class="padding"></div>
28403
28404     <div class="entry">
28405       <div class="title">
28406         <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>
28407       </div>
28408       <div class="date">
28409          2nd May 2010
28410       </div>
28411       <div class="body">
28412         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
28413 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
28414 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
28415
28416 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
28417 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
28418 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
28419 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
28420 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
28421
28422 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
28423 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
28424
28425 <blockquote><pre>
28426 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
28427 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
28428 Password expires                                        : never
28429 Password inactive                                       : never
28430 Account expires                                         : never
28431 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
28432 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
28433 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
28434 root@tjener:~#
28435 </pre></blockquote>
28436
28437 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
28438 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
28439 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
28440 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
28441 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
28442 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
28443
28444 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
28445 intended:</p>
28446
28447 <blockquote><pre>
28448 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
28449 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
28450 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
28451 Password expires                                        : never
28452 Password inactive                                       : never
28453 Account expires                                         : never
28454 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
28455 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
28456 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
28457 root@tjener:~#
28458 </pre></blockquote>
28459
28460 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
28461 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
28462 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
28463
28464 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
28465 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
28466
28467 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
28468 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28469
28470 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
28471 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
28472 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
28473 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
28474 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
28475 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
28476 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
28477
28478 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
28479 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
28480 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
28481 change.</p>
28482
28483       </div>
28484       <div class="tags">
28485
28486
28487         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28488
28489
28490       </div>
28491     </div>
28492     <div class="padding"></div>
28493
28494     <div class="entry">
28495       <div class="title">
28496         <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>
28497       </div>
28498       <div class="date">
28499         28th April 2010
28500       </div>
28501       <div class="body">
28502         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
28503 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
28504 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
28505 and go.</p>
28506
28507 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
28508 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
28509 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
28510 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
28511
28512 <ul>
28513
28514  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
28515    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
28516    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
28517    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
28518    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
28519    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
28520    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
28521    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
28522    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
28523    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
28524    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
28525    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
28526
28527  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
28528    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
28529    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
28530    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
28531    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
28532    or the Fedora developed
28533    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
28534    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
28535
28536  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
28537    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
28538    directory, using unison.</li>
28539
28540  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
28541    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
28542    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
28543    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
28544    implemented.</li>
28545
28546  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
28547    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
28548
28549  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
28550    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
28551    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
28552
28553 </ul>
28554
28555 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
28556 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
28557 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
28558 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
28559 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
28560 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
28561 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
28562 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
28563 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
28564
28565 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28566 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28567
28568       </div>
28569       <div class="tags">
28570
28571
28572         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28573
28574
28575       </div>
28576     </div>
28577     <div class="padding"></div>
28578
28579     <div class="entry">
28580       <div class="title">
28581         <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>
28582       </div>
28583       <div class="date">
28584         19th April 2010
28585       </div>
28586       <div class="body">
28587         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
28588 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
28589 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
28590 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
28591 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
28592 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
28593 restrictions on the web, for example from
28594 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
28595 epub-version from
28596 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
28597 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
28598 strongly recommend this book.</p>
28599
28600       </div>
28601       <div class="tags">
28602
28603
28604         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>.
28605
28606
28607       </div>
28608     </div>
28609     <div class="padding"></div>
28610
28611     <div class="entry">
28612       <div class="title">
28613         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
28614       </div>
28615       <div class="date">
28616         14th April 2010
28617       </div>
28618       <div class="body">
28619         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
28620 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
28621 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
28622 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
28623 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
28624 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
28625 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
28626 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
28627 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
28628
28629 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
28630 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
28631 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
28632 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
28633 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
28634
28635 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
28636 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
28637
28638 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
28639 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
28640 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
28641 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
28642 to work properly.</p>
28643
28644 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
28645 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
28646 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
28647 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
28648 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
28649 time.</p>
28650
28651 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
28652 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
28653 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
28654 up in a few days.</p>
28655
28656       </div>
28657       <div class="tags">
28658
28659
28660         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28661
28662
28663       </div>
28664     </div>
28665     <div class="padding"></div>
28666
28667     <div class="entry">
28668       <div class="title">
28669         <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>
28670       </div>
28671       <div class="date">
28672          6th March 2010
28673       </div>
28674       <div class="body">
28675         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
28676 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
28677 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
28678 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
28679 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
28680 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
28681
28682 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
28683 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
28684 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
28685 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
28686
28687 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
28688 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
28689 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
28690 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
28691 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
28692 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
28693
28694       </div>
28695       <div class="tags">
28696
28697
28698         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28699
28700
28701       </div>
28702     </div>
28703     <div class="padding"></div>
28704
28705     <div class="entry">
28706       <div class="title">
28707         <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>
28708       </div>
28709       <div class="date">
28710         11th February 2010
28711       </div>
28712       <div class="body">
28713         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
28714 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
28715 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
28716 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
28717 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
28718 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
28719 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
28720
28721 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
28722
28723 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
28724 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
28725 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
28726 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
28727
28728       </div>
28729       <div class="tags">
28730
28731
28732         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28733
28734
28735       </div>
28736     </div>
28737     <div class="padding"></div>
28738
28739     <div class="entry">
28740       <div class="title">
28741         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
28742       </div>
28743       <div class="date">
28744         27th January 2010
28745       </div>
28746       <div class="body">
28747         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
28748 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
28749 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
28750 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
28751 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
28752 further.</p>
28753
28754 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
28755 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
28756 configured to be a server for the
28757 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
28758 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
28759 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
28760 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
28761 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
28762 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
28763 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
28764 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
28765 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
28766 and Nagios configuration.</p>
28767
28768 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
28769 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
28770 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
28771 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
28772
28773 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
28774 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
28775 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
28776 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
28777 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
28778 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
28779 the machine.</p>
28780
28781 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
28782 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
28783 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
28784 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
28785
28786 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
28787 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
28788 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
28789 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
28790 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
28791 everything is taken care of.</p>
28792
28793       </div>
28794       <div class="tags">
28795
28796
28797         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28798
28799
28800       </div>
28801     </div>
28802     <div class="padding"></div>
28803
28804     <div class="entry">
28805       <div class="title">
28806         <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>
28807       </div>
28808       <div class="date">
28809         12th August 2009
28810       </div>
28811       <div class="body">
28812         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
28813 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
28814 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
28815 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
28816
28817 <table>
28818 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28819 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
28820 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
28821 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
28822 </table>
28823
28824 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
28825 got these numbers:</p>
28826
28827 <table>
28828 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28829 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
28830 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
28831 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
28832 </table>
28833
28834 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
28835
28836 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
28837 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
28838 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
28839 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
28840 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
28841
28842
28843 <table>
28844 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28845 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
28846 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
28847 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
28848 </table>
28849
28850 <p>And with 'site:no':
28851
28852 <table>
28853 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28854 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
28855 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
28856 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
28857 </table>
28858
28859 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
28860 numbers.</p>
28861
28862       </div>
28863       <div class="tags">
28864
28865
28866         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>.
28867
28868
28869       </div>
28870     </div>
28871     <div class="padding"></div>
28872
28873     <div class="entry">
28874       <div class="title">
28875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
28876       </div>
28877       <div class="date">
28878          8th August 2009
28879       </div>
28880       <div class="body">
28881         <p>According to <a
28882 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
28883 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
28884 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
28885 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
28886 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
28887 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
28888 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
28889 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
28890 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
28891 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
28892
28893 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
28894 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
28895 seminar this autumn.</p>
28896
28897       </div>
28898       <div class="tags">
28899
28900
28901         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>.
28902
28903
28904       </div>
28905     </div>
28906     <div class="padding"></div>
28907
28908     <div class="entry">
28909       <div class="title">
28910         <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>
28911       </div>
28912       <div class="date">
28913         27th July 2009
28914       </div>
28915       <div class="body">
28916         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
28917 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
28918 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
28919 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
28920 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
28921 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
28922 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
28923
28924 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
28925 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
28926 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
28927
28928       </div>
28929       <div class="tags">
28930
28931
28932         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>.
28933
28934
28935       </div>
28936     </div>
28937     <div class="padding"></div>
28938
28939     <div class="entry">
28940       <div class="title">
28941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
28942       </div>
28943       <div class="date">
28944         22nd July 2009
28945       </div>
28946       <div class="body">
28947         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
28948 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
28949 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
28950 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
28951 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
28952 the package up to date.</p>
28953
28954 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
28955 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
28956 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
28957 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
28958 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
28959 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
28960 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
28961 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
28962 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
28963 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
28964 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
28965 working on the future release.</p>
28966
28967 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
28968 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
28969
28970       </div>
28971       <div class="tags">
28972
28973
28974         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>.
28975
28976
28977       </div>
28978     </div>
28979     <div class="padding"></div>
28980
28981     <div class="entry">
28982       <div class="title">
28983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
28984       </div>
28985       <div class="date">
28986         24th June 2009
28987       </div>
28988       <div class="body">
28989         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
28990 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
28991 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
28992 funded
28993 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
28994 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
28995 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
28996 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
28997 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
28998 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
28999
29000 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
29001 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
29002 boot:</p>
29003
29004 <ul>
29005
29006 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
29007
29008 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
29009    clock is in UTC.</li>
29010
29011 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
29012    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
29013    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
29014
29015 </ul>
29016
29017 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
29018 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
29019 Villegas</a>.
29020
29021 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
29022 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
29023 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
29024 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
29025 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
29026 using this.</p>
29027
29028 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
29029 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
29030 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
29031 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
29032 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
29033 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
29034 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
29035
29036       </div>
29037       <div class="tags">
29038
29039
29040         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>.
29041
29042
29043       </div>
29044     </div>
29045     <div class="padding"></div>
29046
29047     <div class="entry">
29048       <div class="title">
29049         <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>
29050       </div>
29051       <div class="date">
29052          2nd May 2009
29053       </div>
29054       <div class="body">
29055         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
29056 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
29057 do not yet know them.</p>
29058
29059 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
29060 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
29061 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
29062 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
29063 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
29064 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
29065 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
29066 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
29067 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
29068 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
29069 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
29070
29071 <p>The second one is
29072 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
29073 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
29074 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
29075 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
29076 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
29077 and the company behind it is running
29078 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
29079 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
29080 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
29081 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
29082 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
29083 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
29084 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
29085 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
29086
29087 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
29088 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
29089 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
29090 surrounded by today.</p>
29091
29092       </div>
29093       <div class="tags">
29094
29095
29096         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
29097
29098
29099       </div>
29100     </div>
29101     <div class="padding"></div>
29102
29103     <div class="entry">
29104       <div class="title">
29105         <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>
29106       </div>
29107       <div class="date">
29108         28th April 2009
29109       </div>
29110       <div class="body">
29111         <p>Julien Blache
29112 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
29113 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
29114 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
29115 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
29116 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
29117 properties.</p>
29118
29119       </div>
29120       <div class="tags">
29121
29122
29123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
29124
29125
29126       </div>
29127     </div>
29128     <div class="padding"></div>
29129
29130     <div class="entry">
29131       <div class="title">
29132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
29133       </div>
29134       <div class="date">
29135          5th April 2009
29136       </div>
29137       <div class="body">
29138         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
29139 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
29140 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
29141 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
29142 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
29143 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
29144 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
29145 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
29146
29147 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
29148 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
29149 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
29150   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
29151   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
29152
29153 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
29154 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
29155 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
29156 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
29157
29158 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
29159 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
29160 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
29161 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
29162
29163 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
29164 set -e
29165 URL="$1"
29166 SAVEFILE="$2"
29167 DURATION="$3"
29168 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
29169   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
29170   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
29171 pid=$!
29172 sleep $DURATION
29173 kill $pid
29174 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
29175
29176       </div>
29177       <div class="tags">
29178
29179
29180         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>.
29181
29182
29183       </div>
29184     </div>
29185     <div class="padding"></div>
29186
29187     <div class="entry">
29188       <div class="title">
29189         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
29190       </div>
29191       <div class="date">
29192         30th March 2009
29193       </div>
29194       <div class="body">
29195         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
29196 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
29197 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
29198 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
29199 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
29200 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
29201 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
29202 application.</p>
29203
29204 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
29205 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
29206 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
29207 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
29208 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
29209 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
29210 blocked from doing so.</p>
29211
29212 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
29213 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
29214 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
29215 requirements change.</p>
29216
29217 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
29218 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
29219 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
29220
29221       </div>
29222       <div class="tags">
29223
29224
29225         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
29226
29227
29228       </div>
29229     </div>
29230     <div class="padding"></div>
29231
29232     <div class="entry">
29233       <div class="title">
29234         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
29235       </div>
29236       <div class="date">
29237         29th March 2009
29238       </div>
29239       <div class="body">
29240         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
29241 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
29242 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
29243 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
29244 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
29245 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
29246 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
29247 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
29248 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
29249 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
29250 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
29251 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
29252 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
29253 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
29254 now. :)</p>
29255
29256       </div>
29257       <div class="tags">
29258
29259
29260         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>.
29261
29262
29263       </div>
29264     </div>
29265     <div class="padding"></div>
29266
29267     <div class="entry">
29268       <div class="title">
29269         <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>
29270       </div>
29271       <div class="date">
29272         29th March 2009
29273       </div>
29274       <div class="body">
29275         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
29276 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
29277 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
29278 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
29279 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
29280 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
29281
29282 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
29283 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
29284 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
29285 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
29286 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
29287 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
29288 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
29289 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
29290 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
29291 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
29292 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
29293 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
29294 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
29295
29296 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
29297 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
29298 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
29299 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
29300
29301 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
29302 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
29303
29304 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
29305 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
29306 new IETF work group?</p>
29307
29308       </div>
29309       <div class="tags">
29310
29311
29312         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>.
29313
29314
29315       </div>
29316     </div>
29317     <div class="padding"></div>
29318
29319     <div class="entry">
29320       <div class="title">
29321         <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>
29322       </div>
29323       <div class="date">
29324         28th February 2009
29325       </div>
29326       <div class="body">
29327         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
29328 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
29329 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
29330 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
29331 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
29332 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
29333 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
29334 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
29335 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
29336 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
29337 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
29338 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
29339 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
29340 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
29341 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
29342 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
29343 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
29344 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
29345 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
29346 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
29347 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
29348 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
29349 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
29350 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
29351 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
29352 machine.</p>
29353
29354 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
29355 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
29356 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
29357 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
29358 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
29359 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
29360 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
29361
29362 <pre>
29363 use LWP::Simple;
29364 use POSIX;
29365 use WWW::Mechanize;
29366 use Date::Parse;
29367 [...]
29368 sub get_support_info {
29369     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
29370     my $str;
29371
29372     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
29373         # fetch website from Dell support
29374         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";
29375         my $webpage = get($url);
29376         return undef unless ($webpage);
29377
29378         my $daysleft = -1;
29379         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
29380         foreach my $line (@lines) {
29381             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
29382             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29383             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
29384
29385             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
29386             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
29387             my $lastend = "";
29388             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
29389                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
29390
29391                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29392                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
29393                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29394                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
29395                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
29396                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
29397                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
29398             }
29399             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29400             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29401                 if ($lastend lt $today);
29402         }
29403     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
29404         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
29405         my $url =
29406             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
29407         $mech->get($url);
29408         my $fields = {
29409             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
29410             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
29411             'country' => 'NO',
29412             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
29413             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
29414         };
29415         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
29416                             fields      => $fields );
29417         # Next step is screen scraping
29418         my $content = $mech->content();
29419
29420         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29421         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
29422         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
29423         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
29424
29425         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29426
29427         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
29428             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
29429                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
29430             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
29431             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29432                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
29433             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29434                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
29435
29436             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
29437
29438             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29439                 if ($end lt $today);
29440         }
29441     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
29442         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
29443         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
29444         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
29445             my $content =
29446                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
29447             if ($content) {
29448                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29449                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
29450                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
29451                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
29452
29453                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
29454                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
29455
29456                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
29457
29458                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29459                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29460                     if ($end lt $today);
29461             }
29462         }
29463     }
29464     return $str;
29465 }
29466 </pre>
29467
29468 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
29469 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
29470 from dmidecode.</p>
29471
29472 <pre>
29473 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
29474                        "447707-B21");
29475 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
29476 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
29477                        "1234567");
29478 </pre>
29479
29480 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
29481 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
29482
29483 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
29484 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
29485 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
29486 do so.</p>
29487
29488       </div>
29489       <div class="tags">
29490
29491
29492         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>.
29493
29494
29495       </div>
29496     </div>
29497     <div class="padding"></div>
29498
29499     <div class="entry">
29500       <div class="title">
29501         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
29502       </div>
29503       <div class="date">
29504         20th February 2009
29505       </div>
29506       <div class="body">
29507         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
29508 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
29509 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
29510 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
29511 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
29512 the "missing" computer.</p>
29513
29514 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
29515 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
29516 code blocks as defined in the
29517 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
29518 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
29519 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
29520 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
29521 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
29522 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
29523 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
29524 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
29525 codes.</p>
29526
29527 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
29528 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
29529 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
29530 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
29531 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
29532 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
29533
29534 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
29535 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
29536 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
29537 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
29538 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
29539 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
29540 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
29541 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
29542 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
29543 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
29544
29545 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
29546 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
29547 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
29548
29549       </div>
29550       <div class="tags">
29551
29552
29553         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>.
29554
29555
29556       </div>
29557     </div>
29558     <div class="padding"></div>
29559
29560     <div class="entry">
29561       <div class="title">
29562         <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>
29563       </div>
29564       <div class="date">
29565         17th January 2009
29566       </div>
29567       <div class="body">
29568         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
29569 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
29570 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
29571 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
29572 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
29573 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
29574 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
29575 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
29576 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
29577 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
29578 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
29579 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
29580 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
29581 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
29582
29583 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
29584 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
29585 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
29586 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
29587 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
29588 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
29589 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
29590 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
29591 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
29592 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
29593 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
29594 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
29595 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
29596 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
29597 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
29598 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
29599 playing when the download is done.</p>
29600
29601 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
29602 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
29603 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
29604 too.</p>
29605
29606 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
29607 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
29608 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
29609 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
29610
29611       </div>
29612       <div class="tags">
29613
29614
29615         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
29616
29617
29618       </div>
29619     </div>
29620     <div class="padding"></div>
29621
29622     <div class="entry">
29623       <div class="title">
29624         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
29625       </div>
29626       <div class="date">
29627         28th December 2008
29628       </div>
29629       <div class="body">
29630         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
29631 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
29632 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
29633 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
29634 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
29635 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
29636 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
29637 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
29638 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
29639 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
29640 source, sink and mixer applications and
29641 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
29642 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
29643 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
29644 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
29645 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
29646 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
29647 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
29648 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
29649 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
29650
29651 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
29652 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
29653 larger stick as well.</p>
29654
29655       </div>
29656       <div class="tags">
29657
29658
29659         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>.
29660
29661
29662       </div>
29663     </div>
29664     <div class="padding"></div>
29665
29666     <div class="entry">
29667       <div class="title">
29668         <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>
29669       </div>
29670       <div class="date">
29671          7th December 2008
29672       </div>
29673       <div class="body">
29674         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
29675 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
29676 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
29677 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
29678 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
29679 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
29680 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
29681 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
29682
29683 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
29684 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
29685 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
29686 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
29687 of these cards.</p>
29688
29689       </div>
29690       <div class="tags">
29691
29692
29693         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>.
29694
29695
29696       </div>
29697     </div>
29698     <div class="padding"></div>
29699
29700     <div class="entry">
29701       <div class="title">
29702         <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>
29703       </div>
29704       <div class="date">
29705         25th November 2008
29706       </div>
29707       <div class="body">
29708         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
29709 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
29710 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
29711 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
29712 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
29713 notes are available on
29714 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
29715 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
29716 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
29717 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
29718 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
29719 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
29720 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
29721 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
29722 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
29723
29724 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
29725 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
29726
29727       </div>
29728       <div class="tags">
29729
29730
29731         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>.
29732
29733
29734       </div>
29735     </div>
29736     <div class="padding"></div>
29737
29738     <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>
29739     <div id="sidebar">
29740
29741
29742
29743 <h2>Archive</h2>
29744 <ul>
29745
29746 <li>2018
29747 <ul>
29748
29749 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
29750
29751 </ul></li>
29752
29753 <li>2017
29754 <ul>
29755
29756 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
29757
29758 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
29759
29760 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
29761
29762 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
29763
29764 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
29765
29766 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
29767
29768 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
29769
29770 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
29771
29772 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
29773
29774 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29775
29776 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
29777
29778 </ul></li>
29779
29780 <li>2016
29781 <ul>
29782
29783 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
29784
29785 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
29786
29787 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
29788
29789 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
29790
29791 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
29792
29793 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29794
29795 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
29796
29797 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
29798
29799 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
29800
29801 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
29802
29803 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
29804
29805 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
29806
29807 </ul></li>
29808
29809 <li>2015
29810 <ul>
29811
29812 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
29813
29814 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
29815
29816 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
29817
29818 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
29819
29820 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
29821
29822 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
29823
29824 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
29825
29826 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
29827
29828 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
29829
29830 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
29831
29832 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
29833
29834 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29835
29836 </ul></li>
29837
29838 <li>2014
29839 <ul>
29840
29841 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
29842
29843 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
29844
29845 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
29846
29847 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
29848
29849 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
29850
29851 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29852
29853 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
29854
29855 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
29856
29857 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
29858
29859 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
29860
29861 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29862
29863 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
29864
29865 </ul></li>
29866
29867 <li>2013
29868 <ul>
29869
29870 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
29871
29872 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
29873
29874 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
29875
29876 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
29877
29878 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29879
29880 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
29881
29882 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
29883
29884 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
29885
29886 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
29887
29888 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
29889
29890 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
29891
29892 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29893
29894 </ul></li>
29895
29896 <li>2012
29897 <ul>
29898
29899 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
29900
29901 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
29902
29903 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
29904
29905 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
29906
29907 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
29908
29909 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
29910
29911 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
29912
29913 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
29914
29915 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
29916
29917 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
29918
29919 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
29920
29921 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
29922
29923 </ul></li>
29924
29925 <li>2011
29926 <ul>
29927
29928 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
29929
29930 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
29931
29932 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
29933
29934 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
29935
29936 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
29937
29938 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29939
29940 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
29941
29942 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
29943
29944 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
29945
29946 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
29947
29948 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29949
29950 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
29951
29952 </ul></li>
29953
29954 <li>2010
29955 <ul>
29956
29957 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
29958
29959 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
29960
29961 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
29962
29963 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
29964
29965 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29966
29967 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
29968
29969 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
29970
29971 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
29972
29973 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
29974
29975 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
29976
29977 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
29978
29979 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
29980
29981 </ul></li>
29982
29983 <li>2009
29984 <ul>
29985
29986 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
29987
29988 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
29989
29990 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
29991
29992 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
29993
29994 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29995
29996 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
29997
29998 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
29999
30000 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
30001
30002 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
30003
30004 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
30005
30006 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
30007
30008 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
30009
30010 </ul></li>
30011
30012 <li>2008
30013 <ul>
30014
30015 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
30016
30017 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
30018
30019 </ul></li>
30020
30021 </ul>
30022
30023
30024
30025 <h2>Tags</h2>
30026 <ul>
30027
30028  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (15)</a></li>
30029
30030  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
30031
30032  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
30033
30034  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
30035
30036  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
30037
30038  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
30039
30040  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
30041
30042  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
30043
30044  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (155)</a></li>
30045
30046  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
30047
30048  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
30049
30050  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
30051
30052  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
30053
30054  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (24)</a></li>
30055
30056  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
30057
30058  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (364)</a></li>
30059
30060  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
30061
30062  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
30063
30064  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
30065
30066  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
30067
30068  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
30069
30070  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
30071
30072  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
30073
30074  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (15)</a></li>
30075
30076  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
30077
30078  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
30079
30080  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
30081
30082  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
30083
30084  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
30085
30086  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
30087
30088  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
30089
30090  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
30091
30092  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (9)</a></li>
30093
30094  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (294)</a></li>
30095
30096  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
30097
30098  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
30099
30100  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
30101
30102  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
30103
30104  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (104)</a></li>
30105
30106  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
30107
30108  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
30109
30110  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
30111
30112  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
30113
30114  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
30115
30116  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
30117
30118  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (5)</a></li>
30119
30120  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
30121
30122  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (53)</a></li>
30123
30124  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
30125
30126  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
30127
30128  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
30129
30130  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
30131
30132  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
30133
30134  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (52)</a></li>
30135
30136  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
30137
30138  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
30139
30140  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
30141
30142  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (10)</a></li>
30143
30144  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (61)</a></li>
30145
30146  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
30147
30148  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (40)</a></li>
30149
30150 </ul>
30151
30152
30153     </div>
30154     <p style="text-align: right">
30155  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
30156 </p>
30157
30158   </body>
30159 </html>